• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.175-182
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• 2023

In general, the design of structures and its construction processes are fundamentally dependent on their foundation and supporting ground. Thus, it is imperative to understand the behavior of the soil under certain stress and drainage conditions. As it is well known that certain characteristics and behaviors of soils with fines are highly dependent on water content, it is critical to accurately measure and identify the status of the soils in terms of water contents. Liquid limit is one of the important soil index properties to define such characteristics. However, liquid limit measurement can be affected by the proficiency of the operator. On the other hand, dynamic properties of soils are also necessary in many different applications and current testing methods often require special equipment in the laboratory, which is often expensive and sensitive to test conditions. In order to address these concerns and advance the state of the art, this study explores a novel method to determine the liquid limit of cohesive soil by employing video-based vibration analysis. In this research, the modal characteristics of cohesive soil columns are extracted from videos by utilizing phase-based motion estimation. By utilizing the proposed method that analyzes the optical flow in every pixel of the series of frames that effectively represents the motion of corresponding points of the soil specimen, the vibration characteristics of the entire soil specimen could be assessed in a non-contact and non-destructive manner. The experimental investigation results compared with the liquid limit determined by the standard method verify that the proposed method reliably and straightforwardly identifies the liquid limit of clay. It is envisioned that the proposed approach could be applied to measuring liquid limit of soil in practical field, entertaining its simple implementation that only requires a digital camera or even a smartphone without the need for special equipment that may be subject to the proficiency of the operator.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.31-38
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• 2009

Lens distortion is inevitable phenomenon in machine vision system. More and more distortion phenomenon is occurring in order to choice of lens for minimizing cost and system size. As shown above, correction of lens distortion is critical issue. However previous lens correction methods using camera model have problem such as nonlinear property and complicated operation. And recent lens correction methods using neural network also have accuracy and efficiency problem. In this study, I propose new algorithms for correction of lens distortion. Distorted image is divided based on the distortion quantity using k-means. And each divided image region is corrected by using neural network. As a result, the proposed algorithms have better accuracy than previous methods without image division.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2020.12a
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• pp.313-322
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• 2020

The recognition of the risk hazards is a vital step to effectively prevent accidents on a construction site. The advanced development in computer vision systems and the availability of the large visual database related to construction site made it possible to take quick action in the event of human error and disaster situations that may occur during management supervision. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the risk factors that need to be managed at the construction site and review appropriate and effective technical methods for each risk factor. This research focuses on analyzing Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) related to risk zone identification rules that can be adopted by the image recognition technology and classify their risk factors depending on the effective technical method. Therefore, this research developed a pattern-oriented classification of OSHA rules that can employ a large scale of safety hazard recognition. This research uses joint reasoning of risk zone Identification and numeric input by utilizing a stereo camera integrated with an image detection algorithm such as (YOLOv3) and Pyramid Stereo Matching Network (PSMNet). The research result identifies risk zones and raises alarm if a target object enters this zone. It also determines numerical information of a target, which recognizes the length, spacing, and angle of the target. Applying image detection joint logic algorithms might leverage the speed and accuracy of hazard detection due to merging more than one factor to prevent accidents in the job site.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Systems Engineering
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• v.20 no.spc1
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• pp.56-64
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• 2024

This study aims to compare and evaluate the usability of domestic and overseas XR devices. With the recent release of 'Apple Vision Pro', interest in the XR field is increasing rapidly. XR devices are being used in various fields such as defense, medical care, education, and entertainment, but the evaluation system for evaluating usability is still insufficient. Therefore, this study aims to derive improvements in domestic equipment through comparative evaluation of usability for two HMD-type devices and one glasses-type device that are released. In order to conduct the study, 20 participants in their 20s to 30s who were interested in XR devices and had no visual sensory organ-related disabilities were evaluated by wearing VR equipment. As a quantitative evaluation, electromyography through an EMG sensor and the device and body temperature of the device through a thermal imaging camera were measured. As a qualitative evaluation, the safety of wearing, ease of wearing, comfort of wearing, and satisfaction of wearing were evaluated. As a result of comparing the usability of the devices based on the results, it was confirmed that domestic HMD-type device needs improvement in the strap part.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.563-570
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• 2024

This paper proposes a method to recognize and track drivable lane areas to assist the driver. The main topic is designing a deep-based network that predicts drivable road areas using computer vision and deep learning technology based on images acquired in real time through a camera installed in the center of the windshield inside the vehicle. This study aims to develop a new model trained with data directly obtained from cameras using the YOLO algorithm. It is expected to play a role in assisting the driver's driving by visualizing the exact location of the vehicle on the actual road consistent with the actual image and displaying and tracking the drivable lane area. As a result of the experiment, it was possible to track the drivable road area in most cases, but in bad weather such as heavy rain at night, there were cases where lanes were not accurately recognized, so improvement in model performance is needed to solve this problem.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.95-103
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• 2024

The diversity of smart EV(electric vehicle)-related industries is increasing due to the growth of battery-based eco-friendly electric vehicle component material technology, and labor-intensive industries such as logistics, manufacturing, food, agriculture, and service have invested in and studied automation for a long time. Accordingly, various types of robots such as autonomous mobile robots and collaborative robots are being utilized for each process to improve industrial engineering such as optimization, productivity management, and work management. The technology that should accompany this unmanned automobile industry is unmanned automatic charging technology, and if autonomous mobile robots are manually charged, the utility of autonomous mobile robots will not be maximized. In this paper, we conducted a study on the technology of unmanned charging of autonomous mobile robots using charging terminal docking and undocking technology using an unmanned charging system composed of hardware such as a monocular camera, multi-joint robot, gripper, and server. In an experiment to evaluate the performance of the system, the average charging terminal recognition rate was 98%, and the average charging terminal recognition speed was 0.0099 seconds. In addition, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the docking and undocking success rate of the charging terminal, and the experimental results showed an average success rate of 99%.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.293-310
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• 2024

In this paper, we propose an agent model for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation (L-ZSON) tasks, which takes in a freeform language description of an unseen target object and navigates to find out the target object in an inexperienced environment. In general, an L-ZSON agent should able to visually ground the target object by understanding the freeform language description of it and recognizing the corresponding visual object in camera images. Moreover, the L-ZSON agent should be also able to build a rich spatial context map over the unknown environment and decide efficient exploration actions based on the map until the target object is present in the field of view. To address these challenging issues, we proposes AML (Agent Model for L-ZSON), a novel L-ZSON agent model to make effective use of AI foundation models such as Large Language Model (LLM) and Vision-Language model (VLM). In order to tackle the visual grounding issue of the target object description, our agent model employs GLEE, a VLM pretrained for locating and identifying arbitrary objects in images and videos in the open world scenario. To meet the exploration policy issue, the proposed agent model leverages the commonsense knowledge of LLM to make sequential navigational decisions. By conducting various quantitative and qualitative experiments with RoboTHOR, the 3D simulation platform and PASTURE, the L-ZSON benchmark dataset, we show the superior performance of the proposed agent model.

• The Korean Journal of Vision Science
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.497-504
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• 2018

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to investigate the temperature changes of the ocular surface before and after cataract surgery using thermography of a thermal imaging camera. Methods : The study included 75 patients (75 eyes) aged from 50 to 79 years who underwent cataract surgery. In the past, those who underwent corneal-related surgery, wearing contact lens, disorder of tear secretion and taking medication for systemic disease were excluded from this study. The temperature changes of the eyeball surface were measured using a thermal imager (Cox CX series, Answer, Korea) following Tear Break Up Time (TBUT) test, Mcmonnies questionnaire and Schirmer's Test in real time, Results : While the temperature of preoperative ocular surface was $35.20{\pm}0.54^{\circ}C$ and that of postoperative temperature was $35.30{\pm}0.53^{\circ}C$, the difference was not significant. The temperature changes in the ocular surface were statistically significant at $-0.12{\pm}0.08{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) before the surgery and $-0.18{\pm}0.07{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) after the surgery. In comparison of the age groups, it was shown that the changes in the surface temperature before the surgery were from $-0.19{\pm}0.05{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) to $-0.14{\pm}0.09{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) in the 50s group, and from $-0.12{\pm}0.08{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) to $-0.15{\pm}0.07{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C/sec$) in 60s group, and $-0.18{\pm}0.07{\Delta}$ ($^{\circ}C$) to $-0.12{\pm}0.08{\Delta}/sec$) in the 70s group, showing significant changes in the ocular surface temperature at all ages. Conclusion : Following the cataract surgery, all the indicators of dry eye syndrome were decreased, and eye surface temperature changes were significant. The thermography technique of the ocular surface would be expected to be useful for the evaluation of various dry eye syndromes because it is easy to evaluate dry eye syndrome noninvasively and can be quantified.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-69
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• 2011

Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using $Nintendo{(R)}$ $Wii^{TM}$ remote. Acceleration signal was sampled in 100hz on 3 axes. Mean recall rate for all the alphabets was 95.48%. Some alphabets recorded very low recall rate and exhibited very high pairwise confusion rate. Major confusion pairs are D(88%) and P(74%), I(81%) and U(75%), N(88%) and W(100%). Though W was recalled perfectly, it contributed much to the false positive classification of N. By comparison with major previous results from VTT (96% for 8 control gestures), CMU (97% for 10 control gestures) and Samsung Electronics(97% for 10 digits and a control gesture), we could find that the performance of our system is superior regarding the number of pattern classes and the complexity of patterns. Using our gesture interaction system, we conducted 2 case studies of robot-based edutainment services. The services were implemented on various robot platforms and mobile devices including $iPhone^{TM}$. The participating children exhibited improved concentration and active reaction on the service with our gesture interface. To prove the effectiveness of our gesture interface, a test was taken by the children after experiencing an English teaching service. The test result showed that those who played with the gesture interface-based robot content marked 10% better score than those with conventional teaching. We conclude that the accelerometer-based gesture interface is a promising technology for flourishing real-world robot-based services and content by complementing the limits of today's conventional interfaces e.g. touch screen, vision and voice.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.312-321
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• 2003

In this paper, we implement robot which are ability to recognize obstacles and moving automatically to destination. we present two results in this paper; hardware implementation of image processing board and software implementation of visual feedback algorithm for a self-controlled robot. In the first part, the mobile robot depends on commands from a control board which is doing image processing part. We have studied the self controlled mobile robot system equipped with a CCD camera for a long time. This robot system consists of a image processing board implemented with DSPs, a stepping motor, a CCD camera. We will propose an algorithm in which commands are delivered for the robot to move in the planned path. The distance that the robot is supposed to move is calculated on the basis of the absolute coordinate and the coordinate of the target spot. And the image signal acquired by the CCD camera mounted on the robot is captured at every sampling time in order for the robot to automatically avoid the obstacle and finally to reach the destination. The image processing board consists of DSP (TMS320VC33), ADV611, SAA7111, ADV7l76A, CPLD(EPM7256ATC144), and SRAM memories. In the second part, the visual feedback control has two types of vision algorithms: obstacle avoidance and path planning. The first algorithm is cell, part of the image divided by blob analysis. We will do image preprocessing to improve the input image. This image preprocessing consists of filtering, edge detection, NOR converting, and threshold-ing. This major image processing includes labeling, segmentation, and pixel density calculation. In the second algorithm, after an image frame went through preprocessing (edge detection, converting, thresholding), the histogram is measured vertically (the y-axis direction). Then, the binary histogram of the image shows waveforms with only black and white variations. Here we use the fact that since obstacles appear as sectional diagrams as if they were walls, there is no variation in the histogram. The intensities of the line histogram are measured as vertically at intervals of 20 pixels. So, we can find uniform and nonuniform regions of the waveforms and define the period of uniform waveforms as an obstacle region. We can see that the algorithm is very useful for the robot to move avoiding obstacles.