• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.79-87
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• 2005

This paper presents an active contour model for extracting accurate facial regions in complex environments. In the model, a contour is represented by a zero level set of level function φ, and evolved via level set partial differential equations. Then, unlike general active contours, skin color information that is represented by 2D Gaussian model is used for evolving and slopping a curve, which allows the proposed method to be robust to noise and varying pose. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method it was tested with several natural scenes, and the results were compared with those of geodesic active contours. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.1150-1159
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• 2006

This paper proposed a curve progress control function of the area base instead of the existing edge indication function, in order to detect the brain ventricle area by utilizing a geodesic active contour model. The proposed curve progress control function is very effective in detecting the brain ventricle area and this function is based on the average brightness of the brain ventricle area which appears brighter in MRI images. Compared numerically by using various measures, the proposed method in this paper can detect brain ventricle areas better than the existing method. By examining images of normal and diseased brain's images by brain tumor, we compared the several brain ventricle detection algorithms with proposed method visually and verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.141-148
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose an algorithm of welding bead detection and evaluation using geodesic active contour algorithm and high pass filter with image processing technique. The algorithm uses histogram equalization and high pass filter as gaussian filter to improve contrast. The image processing techniques smoothens the welding beads reduce the noise on an image. Then, the algorithm detects the welding bead area by applying the geodesic active contour algorithm and morphological ooperation. It also applies the balloon force that either inflates in, or deflates out the evolving contour for a better segmentation. After that, we propose a method for determining the quality of welding bead using effective length and width of the detected bead. In the experiments, our algorithm achieved the highest recall, precision, F-measure and IOU as 0.9894, 0.9668, 0.9780, and 0.8957 respectively. We compared the proposed algorithm with the conventional algorithms to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm achieved better performance compared to the conventional ones with a maximum computational time of 0.6 seconds for segmenting and evaluating one welding bead.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.196-204
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• 2016

World Health Organization reported that heart-related diseases such as coronary artery stenoses show the highest occurrence rate which may cause heart attack. Using Computed Tomography angiography images will allow radiologists to detect and have intervention by creating 3D roadmapping of the vessels. However, it is often complex and difficult do reconstruct 3D vessel which causes very large amount of time and previous researches were studied to segment vessels more accurate automatically. Therefore, in this paper, Region Competition, Geodesic Active Contour (GAC), Multi-atlas based segmentation and Active Shape Model algorithms were applied to segment aortic root from CTA images and the results were analyzed by using mean Hausdorff distance, volume to volume measure, computational time, user-interaction and coronary ostium detection rate. As a result, Extracted 3D aortic model using GAC showed the highest accuracy but also showed highest user-interaction results. Therefore, it is important to improve automatic segmentation algorithm in future

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.641-650
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• 2005

In this parer, curve stopping function based on the CT number of lung parenchyma from CT lung images is proposed to detect lung region in replacement of conventional edge indication function in geodesic active contour model. We showed that the proposed method was able to detect lung region more effectively than conventional method by applying three kinds of measurement numerically. And, we verified the effectiveness of proposed method visually by observing the detection Procedure on actual CT images. Because lung parenchyma region could be precisely detected from actual EBCT (electron beam computer tomography) lung images, we were sure that the Proposed method could aid to early diagnosis of lung disease and local abnormality of function.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.39-46
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• 2007

Research on human identification in ubiquitous environment has recently attracted a lot of attention. As one of those research, gait recognition is an efficient method of human identification using physical features of a walking person at a distance. In this paper, we present a human shape extraction and tracking for gait recognition using geodesic active contour models(GACMs) combined with mean shift algorithm The active contour models (ACMs) are very effective to deal with the non-rigid object because of its elastic property. However, they have the limitation that their performance is mainly dependent on the initial curve. To overcome this problem, we combine the mean shift algorithm with the traditional GACMs. The main idea is very simple. Before evolving using level set method, the initial curve in each frame is re-localized near the human region and is resized enough to include the targe region. This mechanism allows for reducing the number of iterations and for handling the large object motion. The proposed system is composed of human region detection and human shape tracking modules. In the human region detection module, the silhouette of a walking person is extracted by background subtraction and morphologic operation. Then human shape are correctly obtained by the GACMs with mean shift algorithm. In experimental results, the proposed method show that it is extracted and tracked efficiently accurate shape for gait recognition.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.713-720
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• 2007

In image-guided surgery, automatic bone segmentation of Computed Tomography (CT) images is an important but challenging step. Previous attempts include intensity-, edge-, region-, and deformable curve-based approaches [1], but none claims fully satisfactory performance. Although active contour (AC) techniques possess many excellent characteristics, their applications in CT image segmentation have not worthily exploited yet. In this study, we have evaluated the automaticity and performance of the model of Chan-Vese Multiphase AC Without Edges towards knee bone segmentation from CT images. This model is suitable because it is initialization-insensitive and topology-adaptive. Its segmentation results have been qualitatively compared with those from four other widely used AC models: namely Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) AC, Geometric AC, Geodesic AC, and GVF Fast Geometric AC. To quantitatively evaluate its performance, the results from a commercial software and a medical expert have been used. The evaluation results show that the Chan-Vese model provides superior performance with least user interaction, proving its suitability for automatic bone segmentation from CT images.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2000

Iterative curve evolution techniques are powerful methods for image segmentation. Classical methods proposed curve evolutions which guarantee close contours at convergence and, combined with the level set method, they easily handled curve topology changes. In this paper, we present a new geometric active contour model based on level set methods introduced by Osher & Sethian for detection of object boundaries or shape and we adopt anisotropic diffusion filtering method for removing noise from original image. Classical methods allow only one-way curve evolutions : shrinking or expanding of the curve. Thus, the initial curve must encircle all the objects to be segmented or several curves must be used, each one totally inside one object. But our method allows a two-way curve evolution : parts of the curve evolve in the outward direction while others evolve in the inward direction. It offers much more freedom in the initial curve position than with a classical geodesic search method. Our algorithm performs accurate and precise segmentations from noisy images with complex objects(jncluding sharp angles, deep concavities or holes), Besides it easily handled curve topology changes. In order to minimize the processing time, we use the narrow band method which allows us to perform calculations in the neighborhood of the contour and not in the whole image.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.1117-1124
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• 2007

In this paper, an algorithm that can define the threshold value automatically proposed in order to detect a brain ventricle in MRI brain images. After the wavelet transform, edge sharpness, which means the average magnitude of detail signals on the contour of the object, was computed by using the magnitude of horizontal and vertical detail signals. The contours of a brain ventricle were detected by increasing the threshold value repeatedly and computing edge sharpness. When the edge sharpness became maximal, the optimal threshold was determined, and the detection of a brain ventricle was accomplished finally. In this paper, we compared the proposed algorithm with the geodesic active contour model numerically and verified the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by applying real MRI brain images.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2017

Computed tomographic angiography (CTA) is widely used in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease because it shows not only the whole anatomical structure of the cardiovascular three-dimensionally but also provides information on the lesion and type of plaque. However, due to the large size of the image, there is a limitation in manually extracting coronary arteries, and related researches are performed to automatically extract coronary arteries accurately. As the coronary artery originate from the ascending aorta, the ascending aorta and ostium should be detected to extract the coronary tree accurately. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation for the ostium as a starting structure of coronary artery in CTA. First, the region of the ascending aorta is initially detected by using Hough circle transform based on the relative position and size of the ascending aorta. Second, the volume of interest is defined to reduce the search range based on the initial area. Third, the refined ascending aorta is segmented by using a two-dimensional geodesic active contour. Finally, the two ostia are detected within the region of the refined ascending aorta. For the evaluation of our method, we measured the Euclidean distance between the result and the ground truths annotated manually by medical experts in 20 CTA images. The experimental results showed that the ostia were accurately detected.