• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.1296-1301
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• 2008

Ultrasonography constructs pictures of areas inside the body needs in diagnosis by bouncing high-enorgy sound waves(ultrasound) off internal tissues or organs. In constructing an ultrasonographic image, the weakness of bounding signals induces noises and detailed differences of brightness, so that having a difficulty in detecting and diagnosing with the naked eyes in the analysis of ultrasonogram. Especially, the difficulty is extended when diagnosing muscle areas by using ultrasonographic images in the musculoskeletal test. In this paper, we propose a novel image processing method that computationally extracts a muscle area from an ultrasonographic image to assist in diagnosis. An ultrasonographic image consists of areas corresponding to various tissues and internal organs. The proposed method, based on features of intensity distribution, morphology and size of each area, extracts areas of the fascia, the subcutaneous fat and other internal organs, and then extracts a muscle area enclosed by areas of the fascia. In the extraction of areas of the fascia, a series of image processing methods such as histogram stretching, multiple operation, binarization and area connection by labeling is applied. A muscle area is extracted by using features on relative position and morphology of areas for the fascia and muscle areas. The performance evaluation using real ultrasonographic images and specialists' analysis show that the proposed method is able to extract target areas being approximate to real muscle areas.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.973-979
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• 2020

This study aims to objectively and quantitatively determine the social emotion of empathy by collecting pupillary response. 52 subjects (26 men and 26 women) voluntarily participated in the experiment. After the measurement of the reference of 30 seconds, the experiment was divided into the task of imitation and spontaneously self-expression. The two subjects were interacted through facial expressions, and the pupil images were recorded. The pupil data was processed through binarization and circular edge detection algorithm, and outlier detection and removal technique was used to reject eye-blinking. The pupil size according to the empathy was confirmed for statistical significance with test of normality and independent sample t-test. Statistical analysis results, the pupil size was significantly different between empathy (M ± SD = 0.050 ± 1.817)) and non-empathy (M ± SD = 1.659 ± 1.514) condition (t(92) = -4.629, p = 0.000). The rule of empathy according to the pupil size was defined through discriminant analysis, and the rule was verified (Estimation accuracy: 75%) new 12 subjects (6 men and 6 women, mean age ± SD = 22.84 ± 1.57 years). The method proposed in this study is non-contact camera technology and is expected to be utilized in various virtual reality with smart glasses.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.1068-1077
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• 2007

This paper proposes a method that extracts characteristics of cracks such as length, thickness and direction from a concrete slab surface image with image processing techniques. These techniques extract the cracks from the concrete surface image in variable conditions including bad image conditions) using the ART2-based RBF network to recognize the dominant directions -45 degree, 45 degree, horizontal and vertical) of the extracted cracks from the automatically calculated specifications like the lengths, directions and widths of the cracks. Our proposed extraction algorithms and analysis of the concrete cracks used a Robert operation to emphasize the cracks, and a Multiple operation to increase the difference in brightness between the cracks and background. After these treatments, the cracks can be extracted from the image by using an iterated binarization technique. Noise reduction techniques are used three separate times on this binarized image, and the specifications of the cracks are extracted form this noiseless image. The dominant directions can be recognized by using the ART2-based RBF network. In this method, the ART2 is used between the input layer and the middle layer to learn, and the Delta learning method is used between the middle layer and the output layer. The experiments using real concrete images showed that the cracks were effectively extracted, and the Proposed ART2-based RBF network effectively recognized the directions of the extracted cracks.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.113-123
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• 2012

Recently, various attempts have been made to apply Intelligent Transportation System under various environments and conditions. Consequently, an accurate license plate recognition regardless of vehicle location and viewing angle is required. In this paper, we propose a novel license plate recognition system which exploits a) the format of license plates to remove false candidates of license plates and to extract characters in license plates and b) the characteristics of Hangul for accurate character recognition. In order to eliminate false candidates of license plates, the proposed method first aligns the candidates of license plates horizontally, and compares the position and the shape of objects in each candidate with the prior information of license plates provided by Korean Ministry of Construction & Transportation. The prior information such as aspect ratio, background color, projection image is also used to extract characters in license plates accurately applying an improved local binarization considering luminance variation of license plates. In case of recognizing Hangul in license plates, they are initially grouped according to their shape similarity. Then a super-class method, a hierarchical analysis based on key feature points is applied to recognize Hangul accurately. The proposed method was verified with high recognition rate regardless of background image, which eventually proves that the proposed LPR system has high performance regardless of the vehicle location or viewing angle.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.5_2
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• pp.809-818
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• 2019

The Republic of Korea is very vulnerable to damage from storm and flood due to the rainfall phenomenon in summer and the topography of the narrow peninsula. The damage is recently getting worse because of the concentration rainfall. The accurate damage information production and analysis is required to prepare for future disaster. In this study, we analyzed the water surface area changes of Byeokjeong, Sajeom, Subu and Boryeong using Sentinel-1 satellite imagery. The surface area of the Sentinel-1 satellite, taken from May 2015 to August 2019, was preprocessed using RTC and image binarization using Otsu. The water surface area of reservoir was compared with the storage capacity from WAMIS and RIMS. As a result, Subu and Boryeong showed strong correlations of 0.850 and 0.941, respectively, and Byeokjeong and Sajeom showed the normal correlation of 0.651 and 0.657. Thus, SAR satellite imagery can be used to objective data as disaster management.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.41-50
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• 2020

Since cracks in concrete structures expedite corrosion of reinforced concrete over a long period of time, regular on-site inspections are essential to ensure structural usability and prevent degradation. Most of the safety inspections of facilities rely on visual inspection with naked eye, so cost and time consuming are severe, and the reliability of results differs depending on the inspector. In this study, a portable measuring device that can be used for safety diagnosis and maintenance was developed as a device that measures the width and length of concrete cracks through image analysis of cracks photographed with a camera. This device captures the cracks found within a close distance (3 m), and accurately calculates the unit pixel size by laser distance measurement, and automatically calculates the crack length and width with the image processing algorithm developed in this study. In measurement results using the crack image applied to the experiment, the measurement of the length of a 0.3 mm crack within a distance of 3 m was possible with a range of about 10% error. The crack width showed a tendency to be overestimated by detecting surrounding pixels due to vibration and blurring effect during the binarization process, but it could be effectively corrected by applying the crack width reduction function.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.446-452
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• 2021

As a higher standard for food consumption is required, the consumption of chicken meat that can satisfy the subdivided food preferences is increasing. In March 2003, the quality criteria for chicken carcasses notified by the Livestock Quality Assessment Service suggested quality grades according to fecal contamination and the size and weight of blood and bruises. On the other hand, it is too difficult for human inspection to qualify mass products, which is key to maintaining consistency for grading thousands of chicken carcasses. This paper proposed the computer vision algorithm as a non-destructive inspection, which can identify chicken carcass parts according to the detailed standards. To inspect the chicken carcasses conveyed at high speed, the image calibration was involved in providing robustness to the side effect of external lighting interference. The separation between chicken and background was achieved by a series of image processing, such as binarization based on Expectation Maximization, Erosion, and Labeling. In terms of shape analysis of chicken carcasses, the features are presented to reveal geometric information. After applying the algorithm to 78 chicken carcass samples, the algorithm was effective in segmenting chicken carcass against a background and analyzing its geometric features.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.135-142
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• 2023

A various technology of remote sensing and image analysis are applied to study landscape changes and their influencing factors in stream corridors. We developed a method to detect landscape changes over time by calculating the optical index using multispectral images taken from satellites at various time points, calculating the threshold to delineate the boundaries of water bodies, and creating binarized maps into land and water areas. This method was applied to the upstream reach of the weirs in the Geumgang River to track changes in the sandbar formed by the opening of the weir gate. First, we collected multispectral images with a resolution of 10 m × 10 m taken from the Sentinel-2 satellite at various times before and after the opening of the dam in the Geumgang River. The normalized difference water index (NDWI) was calculated using the green light and near-infrared bands from the collected images. The Otsu's threshold of NDWI calculated to delineate the boundary of the water body ranged from -0.0573 to 0.1367. The boundary of the water area determined by remote sensing matched the boundary in the actual image. A map binarized into water and land areas was created using NDWI and the Otsu's threshold. According to these results of the developed method, it was estimated that a total of 379.7 ha of new sandbar was formed by opening the three weir floodgates from 2017 to 2021 in the longitudinal range from Baekje Weir to Daecheong Dam on the Geumgang River. The landscape detection method developed in this study is evaluated as a useful method that can obtain objective results with few resources over a wide spatial and temporal range.