• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2013.04a
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• pp.116-121
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• 2013

Panaroma Sun roof's sun shade motor elicits two major sounds when operating: the tonal sound and the white noises. Generally, the sound related to the sharpness contributes the most to the quality of motors' tonal sound. The primary purpose of this study was to set the loudness of the motor's objective tonal sound utilizing the masking effect by its white noises. To conduct this study, the sound made by the operating sun shade motor was categorized into two different subsets of masker and test tone to examine the masking threshold. Also, the shifts of masking threshold were observed with the varying masker loudness.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.62-68
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• 2010

This paper proposes a new masking threshold adjustment strategy to improve the performance for speech signals in low bit-rate audio coding. After determining formant regions, the masking threshold is adjusted by using the energy ratio of each sub-band to the average energy of each formant. More quantization noises are added to the bands that have relatively large energy, but less distortion is allowed in spectral valley regions by allocating more bits, which reflects the concept of perceptual weighting widely used in speech coding. From the results of objective speech quality measure, we verified that the proposed method improves quality for the speech input signals compared to the conventional one.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.12-21
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• 2000

In this paper, we propose a novel hearing aid algorithm for sensorinural hearing loss restoration with multi-channel(band) dynamic range compression and psychoacoustics. In this way, we can present a normal perception condition to the impaired listener. The proposed algorithm make loudness scaling function achieve proper loudness level, and analysis masking property for the signal will be perceived to impaired listener, and then, restore normal spectral contrast using SMR(signal-to-masking ratio) defined by distance between the level of each frequency and masking threshold.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.985-988
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• 2007

This paper presents techniques to make image enhancement using unsharp masking. It is the technique to make image enhancement by automatically find the three parameters that makes hard to use the unsharp mask technique. To optimize the three parameters(Threshold, Amount, Radius), at first classify the pixels in the image to three groups, and then according to the groups, apply the unsharp mask to the image differently. We experimented and analyzed the rate of image enhancement by comparing images which is enhanced by human and which is enhanced by proposed technique.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.599-602
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• 1998

In this paper, a speech enhancement method based on phonemic properties and masking effect is propsoed. It is a modified type of spectral subtraction wherein the spectral sharpening process is exploited in unvoiced state considering the phonemic properties. The masking threshold is used to remove the residual noise. The proposed spectral subtraction shows similar performance as that of the classical spectral subtraction method in view of the SNR. But by the prposed scheme, the unvoiced sound region is shown to exhibit relatively less signal distortion in the enhanced speech.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.53-58
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• 2001

In this paper to develop objective speech quality measure for CDMA telephone network environments, recent developed measures are investigated first. But those measures show low performances in CDMA telephone networks. To solve this problem, new objective speech quality measure adopting noise masking threshold is proposed and studied. To acquire better performance, scaled noise masking threshold calculation for speech signals is employed instead of conventional tone signals. To verify effectiveness of proposed method performance comparison experiments are carried out for CDMA telephone network speech databases, for the results proposed methods show improved performances compared to existing meaures.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2001.04a
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• pp.859-861
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• 2001

본 논문은 오디오의 masking특성을 적용한 심리음향 모델을 이용하여 오디오의 고음질을 보장하면서 잡음과 압축 등의 공격에 강한 오디오 워터마킹 방법을 제안한다. 제안하는 워터마킹 방법은 심리음향 모델에 의해 생산되는 masking thresholds와 원신호의 power spectral density의 각 주파수별 차이 에너지를 이용하여 시간도메인에서 워터마크를 삽입하는 방법으로 오디오의 품질을 유지할 수 있다. 워터마크로는 자기상관성이 강한 PN-시퀀스를 이용하여 강인한 워터마킹을 구현한다. 그리고 PN-시퀀스와 같은 이진 시퀀스 워터마크의 검출을 위한 유사도 측정식을 제안한다.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1991 no.05
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• pp.43-46
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• 1991

In this study, peripheral auditory system has been modeled as a filter bank of overlaping bandpass filters, and auditory filter shape has been estimated by notch noise masking. The filter was centered at 1kHz, and noise level was set to 40dB SPL. Masker noise was generated by summing sinusoidal functions with random phase for very steep skirts. To estimate threshold we used two alternative forced choice with 500 msec of duration. We measured threshold with notch width at 0.05,0.1,0.2,0.3,0.4 and 0.5. The filter was asymmetric with steeper upper branch and its ERB was 168 - 192 Hz.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.11 no.2 s.31
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• pp.191-199
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• 2006

This paper presents an efficient pre echo control scheme for MPEG Audio coders based on the psychoacoustic model II (PAM-II). Pre echo control is the final step for the calculation of masking threshold in the PAM II. It is to minimize the spread of quantization error over the processing frame. In the conventional encoders, pre echo is reduced by restricting the estimated masking threshold not to exceed the one obtained in the previous frame. The conventional method performs pre echo control not only for short blocks but also for long blocks, which lowers the masking threshold in long blocks and, in turn, increases the quantization noise level of corresponding blocks. This paper proposes an efficient pre echo control process. The test result shows a mean enhancement of more than 0.4 especially for complex signals on the ITU R 5 point audio impairment scale.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.13-20
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• 2008

Although digital hearing aid algorithms have been developed to compensate hearing loss and to help hearing impaired people to communicate with others, digital hearing aid user still complain about difficulty of hearing the speech. The reason could be the quality of speech through digital hearing aid is insufficient to understand the speech caused by feedback, residual noise and etc. And another thing is masking effect among formants that makes sound quality low. In this study, we measured the masking characteristics of normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners having presbyacusis to confirm masking effect in speech itself. The experiment is composed of 5 tests; pure tone test, speech reception threshold (SRT) test, word recognition score (WRS) test, puretone masking test and speech masking test. In speech masking test, there are 25 speeches in each speech set. And log likelihood ratio (LLR) is introduced to evaluate the distortion of each speech objectively. As a result, the speech perception became lower by increasing the quantity of formant enhancement. And each enhanced speech in a speech set has statistically similar LLR, however speech perception is not. It means that acoustic masking effect rather than distortion influences speech perception. In actuality, according to the result of frequency analysis of the speech that people can not answer correctly, level difference between first formant and second formant is about 35dB, and it is similar to result of pure tone masking test(normal hearing subject:36.36dB, hearing impaired subject:32.86dB). Characteristics of masking effect is not similar between normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners. So it is required to check the characteristics of masking effect before wearing a hearing aid and to apply this characteristics to fitting.