• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.1-11
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• 2003

The objective of this research is the development of the Automatic Subjective Assessment System (ASAS). The proposed subjective assessment system is designed to evaluate human emotion and sensibility (or "gamsung" in Korean terminology) with subjective responses of volunteers about the experiment of emotion and sensibility. Once volunteers enter their subjective responses about the experiment into the developed system, the proposed system can automatically generate statistical results of human emotion and sensibility using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Then, the system stores the statistical results in the database which will be open to public through internet. The proposed system will be integrated into the universal" gamsung" assessment system for evaluation of human emotion and sensibility.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.127-134
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• 2005

Human sensibility is assessed by measuring and analyzing various physiological signals in an objective way, or by analyzing adjectives chosen by the subjects in a subjective way. The present study aims at developing an integrated human sensibility assessment system that measures changes in a person's objective and subjective sensibility in real-time and analyzes them in an integrative way. The present system is composed of a real-time subjective sensibility assessment system, an automatic subjective sensibility assessment system and a real-time physiological signal measurement and analysis system for sensibility assessment, which are separated from one another. It can be utilized individually, or can be combined as a synthetic sensibility assessment system for comprehensive sensibility assessment.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.32 no.7
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• pp.561-568
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• 2008

The quality of the automatic transmission shift for a wheel loader has been generally evaluated by driver's perception. However the subjective evaluation of the drivers is not always directly related to the shift quality. It is necessary to set up the method for an objective assessment of the shift quality. In this paper, a quantitative assessment method has been developed for the shift quality of the automatic transmission in a wheel loader. The indices for the evaluation were selected through the various tests like the acceleration and the turbine rpm as well as the subjective evaluation of the driver, and were validated by the correlation between subjective and objective assessments using a psychophysical power law. Based on this method, the shift quality of a wheel loader has been evaluated quantitatively under various shift conditions.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.495-501
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• 2011

The objective of this study was to evaluate the convenience of the tractor seatbelt. We selected four healthy men as subjects. We measured their body pressure and examined the comfort of the seatbelt, while driving 50m on three different types of agricultural road with two types of seatbelts: automatic and manual. As results, when they used manual seatbelt, subjective uncomfortable rate was much higher than the automatic seatbelt on all types of road. Especially, body pressure was undistributed while using manual seatbelt on rough road.

• PNF and Movement
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.329-337
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• 2019

Purpose: Ultrasound imaging is commonly used to measure the pennation angle of human skeletal muscles in vivo. However, manual assessment of the pennation angle using ultrasound images is subjective and time-consuming and requires a high level of examiner skill. The architectural analysis of human skeletal muscles is thus challenging. Automated approaches using image processing techniques are therefore required to estimate the pennation angle in ultrasound images. The purpose of this study was thus to assess the intra-tester and inter-tester reliability and validity of the pennation angle using an automatic measurement program. Methods: Twenty-two healthy young adults (mean age = 22.55 years) with no medical history of neurological or musculoskeletal disorders voluntarily participated in this study. Ultrasound imaging was used to measure the pennation angle of the gastrocnemius muscle at rest. One examiner acquired images from all the participants. The intra-tester and inter-tester reliability were evaluated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) to estimate reliability. Validity was measured using Pearson's correlation coefficient. Results: The intra-rater reliability was excellent for the automatic pennation angle measuring program and the manual pennation angle assessment method (ICC>0.95). The inter-rater reliability was also excellent for both methods (ICC>0.93). All the correlation coefficients for the automatic pennation angle measuring program and the manual pennation angle assessment method were 0.79, which indicated a significantly positive correlation (p<0.05). Conclusion: Pennation angle measurement using the automatic pennation angle measuring program showed acceptable reliability and validity. This study therefore demonstrated that the automatic measuring program was able to automatically measure the pennation angle of skeletal muscles using ultrasound images, and thus made it easy to investigate skeletal muscle architecture.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.75-83
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• 2017

Purpose : The parameters used in architectural analysis are muscle thickness, fascicle length, pennation angle, etc. Pennation angle is an important muscle characteristic that plays a significant role in determining a fascicle's force contribution to movement. Ultrasonography has been widely used to obtain the image for measurement of a pennation angle since it is non-invasive and real-time. However, manual assessment in ultrasonographic images is time-consuming and subjective, making it difficult for using in muscle function analysis. Thus, in this study, I proposed an automatic method to extract the pennation angle from the ultrasonographic images of gastrocnemius muscle. Method : The ultrasonographic image obtained from 10 healthy participants's gastrocnemius muscle using for developed automatic measuring program. Automatic measuring program algorithm consists with preprocessing, line detection, line classification, and angle calculation. The resulting image was then used to detect the fascicles and aponeuroses for calculating the pennation angle with the consideration of their distribution in ultrasonographic image. Result : The proposed automatic measurement program showed the stable repeatability of pennation angle calculation. Conclusion : This study demonstrated that the proposed method was able to automatically measure the pennation angle of gastrocnemius, which made it possible to easily and reliably investigate pennation angle more.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.837-856
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• 2016

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.181-197
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• 2015

Assessing the condition of paint on civil structures is an important but challenging and costly task, in particular when it comes to large and complex structures. Current practices of visual inspection are labour-intensive and time-consuming to perform. In addition, this task usually relies on the experience and subjective judgment of individual inspectors. In this study, hyperspectral imaging and classification techniques are proposed as a method to objectively assess the state of the paint on a civil or other structure. The ultimate objective of the work is to develop a technology that can provide precise and automatic grading of paint condition and assessment of degradation due to age or environmental factors. Towards this goal, we acquired hyperspectral images of steel surfaces located at long (mid-range) and short distances on the Sydney Harbour Bridge with an Acousto-Optics Tunable filter (AOTF) hyperspectral camera (consisting of 21 bands in the visible spectrum). We trained a multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier to automatically assess the grading of the paint from hyperspectral signatures. Our results demonstrate that the classifier generates highly accurate assessment of the paint condition in comparison to the judgement of human experts.

• Archives of design research
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.481-488
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• 2003

A method to select the proper file formats of thumbnail images is proposed. After the experimental works for image file formats such as JPEG, GIF, and those effectiveness to the features contained in images, four features are obtained by feature extraction methods used in contents based image indexing, those are, the details, highly saturated colored area, the number of clustered color, and the amount of continuously varying hue. Also it is described the way to select the proper file format with those four features. In the thumbnail image generation experiments, 6 sample images are used, and with subjective assessment experiments, the resulted thumbnail images are shown to be consistent to the file formats chosen by human subjects, that is, favorable to human vision, which means the proposed method can be utilized as an automatic and systematic generation of thumbnail images for a lot of images on Web.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.1-5
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• 2011

The infection rate of syphilis is still increasing in the world especially in developing countries and the infection is often seen in large amounts of clinical specimens. For the diagnosis of this disease, Rapid Plasma Reagin (RPR)/Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) has still been used as one of major primary methods to diagnose syphilis even though the test readings are somewhat subjective with high false positive rates. Recently, the automatic ARCHITECT Syphilis TP, which is based on the detection of the TP-specific antibodies, has been introduced in many laboratories. Therefore, the clinical assessment of the method is needed to provide primary diagnosis of syphilis at the moment. We evaluated 3 different manual rapid kits and ARCHITECT Syphilis TP comparing with RPR/FTA-ABS and analysed their diagnostic properties. From February 2006 to April 2008, 203 positive and 250 negative specimens, obtained from Chungbuk National University Hospital were used for the evaluation. In the evaluation between manual rapid kits, their specificities were as high as 99.2 ~ 99.6% while their sensitivities were observed with little differences; 98.0% (199/203) for Kit A, 96.6% (196/203) for Kit B, and 97.4% (197/203) for Kit S. In the case of ARCHITECT Syphilis TP test, it showed 100% specificity (250/250) and 98.5% sensitivity (249/250). Kappa values comparing with RPR/FTA-ABS were 0.978 for Kit A, 0.964 for Kit B and Kit S, and 0.987 for ARCHITECT Syphilis TP. From our evaluation, we found out that manual rapid tests and ARCHITECT Syphilis TP have very good clinical accuracies and high kappa agreements with RPR/FTA-ABS. Due to its automation and quick simultaneous diagnosis with another serological markers, we suggest that the ARCHITECT Syphilis TP is one of best suitable method for the primary diagnosis of syphilis and that it might be able to replace RPR method in the laboratories.