• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.814-820
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• 2020

Objective : Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is a severe neuropathic condition that affects several elderly patients. It is characterized by uncontrolled pain that significantly impacts the quality of life of patients. Therefore, the condition should be treated as an emergency. In the majority of patients, pain can be controlled with medication; however, other treatment modalities are being explored in those who become refractory to drug treatment. The use of the trigeminal nerve block with a local anesthetic serves as an excellent adjunct to drug treatment. This technique rapidly relieves the patient of pain while medications are being titrated to effective levels. We report the efficacy and safety of percutaneous trigeminal nerve block in elderly patients with TN at our outpatient clinic. Methods : Twenty-one patients older than 65 years with TN received percutaneous nerve block at our outpatient clinic. We used bupivacaine (1 mL/injection site) to block the supraorbital, infraorbital, superior alveolar, mental, and inferior alveolar nerves according to pain sites of patients. Results : All patients reported relief from pain, which decreased by approximately 78% after 2 weeks of nerve block. The effect lasted for more than 4 weeks in 12 patients and for 6 weeks in two patients. There were no complications. Conclusion : Percutaneous nerve block procedure performed at our outpatient clinic provided immediate relief from pain to elderly patients with TN. The procedure is simple, has no serious side effects, and is easy to apply.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.1452-1459
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• 2016

Compressed sensing is a signal processing technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing in and under Nyquist rate representation. Generally, the measurement prediction usually works well with a small block while the quality of recovery is known to be better with a large block. In order to overcome this dilemma, conventional research works use a structural measurement matrix with which compressed sensing is done in a small block size but recovery is performed in a large block size. In this way, both prediction and recovery are made to be improved at same time. However, the conventional researches did not compare the performances of the structural measurement matrix, affected by the block size. In this paper, by expanding a structural measurement matrix of conventional works, their performances are compared with different block sizes. Experimental results show that a structural measurement matrix with $4{\times}4$ Hadamard transform matrix provides superior performance in block size 4.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.2S
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• pp.638-648
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• 2000

This paper introduces a new technique for block is matching motion estimation. Since the temporal correlation of the image sequence, the motion vector of a block is highly related to the motion vector of the same coordinate block in the previous image frame. If we can obtain useful and enough information from the motion vector of the same coordinate block of the previous frame, the total number of search points used to find the motion vector of the current block may be reduced significantly. Using that idea, an efficient predicted direction search algorithm (PDSA) for block matching algorithm is proposed. Based on the direction of the blocks of the two successive previous frames, if the direction of the to successive blocks is same, the first search point of the proposed PDSA is moved two pixels to the direction of the block. The searching process after moving the first search point is processed according to the fixed search patterns. Otherwise, full search is performed with search area $\pm$2. Simulation results show that PSNR values are improved up to the 3.4dB as depend on the image sequences and improved about 1.5dB on an average. Search times are reduced about 20% than the other fast search algorithms. Simulation results also show that the performance of the PDSA scheme gives better subjective picture quality than the other fast search algorithms and is closer to that of the FS(Full Search) algorithm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.1499-1513
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• 2014

This paper proposes a novel blind image watermarking scheme exploiting Block Truncation Coding (BTC). Most of existing BTC-based watermarking or data hiding methods embed information in BTC compressed images by modifying the BTC encoding stage or BTC-compressed data, resulting in watermarked images with bad quality. Other than existing BTC-based watermarking schemes, our scheme does not really perform the BTC compression on images during the embedding process but uses the parity of BTC quantization data to guide the watermark embedding and extraction processes. In our scheme, we use a binary image as the original watermark. During the embedding process, the original cover image is first partitioned into non-overlapping $4{\times}4$ blocks. Then, BTC is performed on each block to obtain its BTC quantized high mean and low mean. According to the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean, two watermark bits are embedded in each block by modifying the pixel values in the block to make sure that the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean in the modified block are equal to the two watermark bits. During the extraction process, BTC is first performed on each block to obtain its high mean and low mean. By checking the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean, we can extract the two watermark bits in each block. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method is fragile to most image processing operations and various kinds of attacks while preserving the invisibility very well, thus the proposed scheme can be used for image authentication.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.273-278
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• 2016

In HEVC variable block size motion estimation, same search window data are duplicatedly used in each block size. It increases memory bandwidth, and it is difficult to exploit early termination. In this paper, largest block size and its corresponding smaller block sizes with same positions are performed at the same time. It reduces memory bandwidth and computation by reusing search window data and computation results. In the early termination, image quality can be degraded when it determines early termination by observing largest block size only, since smaller block sizes cannot be equally terminated due to their relative positions. So, in this paper, processing order of early termination is changed to perform smaller block sizes in turns. The designed motion estimation engine was described in Verilog HDL and it was synthesized and verified in 0.18um process technology. Its gate count and maximum operating frequency are 36,101 gates and 263.15 MHz, respectively.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.02a
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• pp.931-936
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• 2006

This paper presents different issues of the real-time compression algorithms without compromising the video quality in the distributed environment. The theme of this research is to manage the critical processing stages (speed, information lost, redundancy, distortion) having better encoded ratio, without the fluctuation of quantization scale by using IP configuration. In this paper, different techniques such as distortion measure with searching method cover the block phenomenon with motion estimation process while passing technique and floating measurement is configured by discrete cosine transform (DCT) to reduce computational complexity which is implemented in this video codec. While delay of bits in encoded buffer side especially in real-time state is being controlled to produce the video with high quality and maintenance a low buffering delay. Our results show the performance accuracy gain with better achievement in all the above processes in an encouraging mode.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.393-396
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• 2002

The objectives of the paper are to develop the infra-technologies for reclaiming the effluents from wastewater treatment plants and reusing for agriculture water. The Suwon wastewater treatment plant has been selected for wastewater reuse tests and the water quality and treatment efficiencies are investigated. Three levels of wastewater treatments that are the effluent from the plant, sand filtering, and ultra-violet treatment are applied in the pilot system. The randomized block method was applied to wastewater application to paddy rice with five treatments, three blocks, and two replica. The control was the plots with groundwater irrigation, the other treatments are to use polluted stream flow by pumping, in addition to three wastewater treatments. The block test plots and field plots have been monitored for the water quality, soil pollution, and health hazards during the crop stages.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.6B
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• pp.1028-1040
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• 2000

Since image data has large data amount, proper image compression is necessary to transmit and store the data efficiently. Image compression brings about bit rate reduction but results in some artifacts. This artifacts are blocking artifacts, mosquito noise, which are observed in DCT based compression image, and ringing artifacts, which is perceived around the edges in wavelet based compression image. In this paper, we propose directional postprocessing technique which improved the decoded image quality using the fact that human vision is sensible to ringing artifacts around the edges of image. First we detect the edge direction in each block. Next we perform directional postprocessing according to detected edge direction. Proposed method is that the edge direction is block. Next performed directional postprocessing according to detected edge direction. If the correlation coefficients are equivalent to each directions, postprocessing is not performed. So, time of the postproces ing brings about shorten.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.268-274
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• 2010

A steganographic method using three directional data embedding for gray images is presented in this paper. Cover image is divided into non-overlapping $2\times2$ sub-blocks and the basis pixel is selected to calculate the three different values of each sub-block. Difference values are replaced by embedding the number of secret bits that is referenced by the range table. For the three pixel pairs in the sub-block, the optimal pixel adjustment is preceded to reduce the distortion of visual quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good visual quality and high capacity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.678-683
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• 2009

A lot of researches [1] have been conducted on digital watermark embedding in brightness. A prerequisite for the digital watermark is that the image quality does not change even if the volume of the embedded information increases. Generally, the noise on complex images is perceived than the noise on fiat images. Thus, we present a method for watermarking an image by embedding complex areas by priority. The proposed method has achieved higher image quality of digital watermarking compared to other method that do not take into consideration the complexity of blocks, although the PSNR of the proposed method is lower than for a method not based on block complexity.