• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.681-691
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• 2010

LiDAR waveform decomposition plays an important role in LiDAR data processing since the resulting decomposed components are assumed to represent reflection surfaces within waveform footprints and the decomposition results ultimately affect the interpretation of LiDAR waveform data. Decomposing the waveform into a mixture of Gaussians involves two related problems; 1) determining the number of Gaussian components in the waveform, and 2) estimating the parameters of each Gaussian component of the mixture. Previous studies estimated the number of components in the mixture before the parameter optimization step, and it tended to suggest a larger number of components than is required due to the inherent noise embedded in the waveform data. In order to tackle these issues, a new LiDAR waveform decomposition algorithm based on the sequential approach has been proposed in this study and applied to the ICESat waveform data. Experimental results indicated that the proposed algorithm utilized a smaller number of components to decompose waveforms, while resulting IMP value is higher than the GLA14 products.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.547-557
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• 2009

LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) is an active remote sensing technology which provides 3D coordinates of the Earth's surface by performing range measurements from the sensor. Early small footprint LIDAR systems recorded multiple discrete returns from the back-scattered energy. Recent advances in LIDAR hardware now make it possible to record full digital waveforms of the returned energy. LIDAR waveform decomposition involves separating the return waveform into a mixture of components which are then used to characterize the original data. The most common statistical mixture model used for this process is the Gaussian mixture. Waveform decomposition plays an important role in LIDAR waveform processing, since the resulting components are expected to represent reflection surfaces within waveform footprints. Hence the decomposition results ultimately affect the interpretation of LIDAR waveform data. Computational requirements in the waveform decomposition process result from two factors; (1) estimation of the number of components in a mixture and the resulting parameter estimates, which are inter-related and cannot be solved separately, and (2) parameter optimization does not have a closed form solution, and thus needs to be solved iteratively. The current state-of-the-art airborne LIDAR system acquires more than 50,000 waveforms per second, so decomposing the enormous number of waveforms is challenging using traditional single processor architecture. To tackle this issue, four parallel LIDAR waveform decomposition algorithms with different work load balancing schemes - (1) no weighting, (2) a decomposition results-based linear weighting, (3) a decomposition results-based squared weighting, and (4) a decomposition time-based linear weighting - were developed and tested with varying number of processors (8-256). The results were compared in terms of efficiency. Overall, the decomposition time-based linear weighting work load balancing approach yielded the best performance among four approaches.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.6_1
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• pp.1709-1718
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• 2021

The waveform data of the Airborne Bathymetric LiDAR (ABL; LiDAR: Light Detection And Ranging) system provides data with improved accuracy, resolution, and reliability compared to the discrete-return data, and increases the user's control over data processing. Furthermore, we are able to extract additional information about the return signal. Waveform decomposition is a technique that separates each echo from the received waveform with a mixture of water surface and seabed reflections, waterbody backscattering, and various noises. In this study, a new waveform decomposition technique based on a Gaussian model was developed to improve the point extraction performance from the ABL waveform data. In the existing waveform decomposition techniques, the number of decomposed echoes and decomposition performance depend on the peak detection results because they use waveform peaks as initial values. However, in the study, we improved the approximation accuracy of the decomposition model by adding the estimated potential peak candidates to the initial peaks. As a result of an experiment using waveform data obtained from the East Coast from the Seahawk system, the precision of the decomposition model was improved by about 37% based on evaluating RMSE compared to the Gaussian decomposition method.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.5-27
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• 1985

A hill-sliding technique was devised to extract Gaussian clusters from the multivariate probability density estimates of sample data for the first step of iterative unsupervised classification. The underlying assumption in this approach was that each cluster possessed a unimodal normal distribution. The key idea was that a clustering function proposed could distinguish elements of a cluster under formation from the rest in the feature space. Initial clusters were extracted one by one according to the hill-sliding tactics. A dimensionless cluster compactness parameter was proposed as a universal measure of cluster goodness and used satisfactorily in test runs with Landsat multispectral scanner (MSS) data. The normalized divergence, defined by the cluster divergence divided by the entropy of the entire sample data, was utilized as a general separability measure between clusters. An overall clustering objective function was set forth in terms of cluster covariance matrices, from which the cluster compactness measure could be deduced. Minimal improvement of initial data partitioning was evaluated by this objective function in eliminating scattered sparse data points. The hill-sliding clustering technique developed herein has the potential applicability to decomposition of any multivariate mixture distribution into a number of unimodal distributions when an appropriate diatribution function to the data set is employed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.189-199
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• 2024

To properly extract the strain components under varying operational conditions is very important in bridge health monitoring. The abnormal sensor readings can be correctly identified and the expected operational performance of the bridge can be better understood if each strain components can be accurately quantified. In this study, strain components under varying load conditions, i.e., temperature variation and live-load variation are evaluated based on field strain measurements collected from a real concrete box-girder bridge. Temperature-induced strain is mainly regarded as the trend variation along with the ambient temperature, thus a smoothing technique based on the wavelet packet decomposition method is proposed to estimate the temperature-induced strain. However, how to effectively extract the vehicle-induced strain is always troublesome because conventional threshold setting-based methods cease to function: if the threshold is set too large, the minor response will be ignored, and if too small, noise will be introduced. Therefore, an autoencoder framework is proposed to evaluate the vehicle-induced strain. After the elimination of temperature and vehicle-induced strain, the left of which, defined as the model error, is used to assess the operational performance of the bridge. As empirical techniques fail to detect the degraded state of the structure, a clustering technique based on Gaussian Mixture Model is employed to identify the damage occurrence and the validity is verified in a simulation study.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.1
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• pp.113-118
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• 2002

This paper presents a cluster-based image retrieval method. It retrieves images from a related cluster after classifying images into clusters using RAGMD, a clustering technique. When images are retrieved, first they are retrieved not from the whole image database one by one but from the similar cluster, a similar small image group with a query image. So it gives us retrieval-time reduction, keeping almost the same precision with the exhaustive retrieval. In the experiment using an image database consisting of about 2,400 real images, it shows that the proposed method is about 18 times faster than 7he exhaustive method with almost same precision and it can retrieve more similar images which belong to the same class with a query image.