• Journal of Electrical Engineering and information Science
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.77-81
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• 1996

Considering the human visual masking property, a modified relationship between the activity function and the visibility threshold is developed. This leads to a novel objective appraisal method for blocking effects in a lossy subimage coding by virtue of the human visual sensitivity. The appraisal criterion is examined using a series of reconstructed images that are DCT-coded at various bit rates. Experimental results show that the presented blocking effect measure well agrees with the subjective ranking.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.345-346
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose the noise suppressor with the psychoacoustic model and wavelet packet transform. The objective of the scheme is to enhance speech corrupted by colored or non-stationary noise. If corrupted noise is colored, subband approach would be more efficient than whole band one. To avoid serious residual noise and speech distortion, we must adjust the Wavelet Coefficient threshold. In this paper, the subband is designed matching with the critical band. And WCT is adapted by noise masking threshold(NMT) and segmental signal to noise ratio(seg_SNR). Consequently this work improve the PESQ-MOS about 0.23 in the case of coded speech.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1061-1068
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• 2012

This paper deals with a noise reduction algorithm which uses the binary masking approach in the time-frequency domain to improve speech intelligibility. In the binary masking approach, the noise-corrupted speech is decomposed into time-frequency units. Noise-dominant time-frequency units are removed by setting the corresponding binary masks as "0"s and target-dominant units are retained untouched by assigning mask "1"s. We propose a binary mask estimation by comparing the local signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to a threshold. The local SNR is estimated by a training-based approach. An optimal threshold is proposed, which is obtained from observing the distribution of the training database. The proposed method is evaluated by normal-hearing subjects and the intelligibility scores are computed by counting the number of words correctly recognized.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.8C
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• pp.822-829
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• 2009

This paper proposes a new method of improving the quality of High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC). HE-AAC encodes input source by allocating bits for each scalefactor bands appropriately according to human ear's psychoacoustic property. As a result, insufficient bits are assigned to the bands which have relatively low energy. This imbalance between different energy bands can cause decreasing of sound quality like musical noise. In the proposed system, a Linear Prediction (LP) module is combined with HE-AAC as a pre-processor to improve sound quality by even bits distribution. To apply accurate human being's psychoacoustic property, the psychoacoustic model uses Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrum of original input signal to make masking threshold. In its implementation, masking threshold of psychoacoustic model is normalized using the LP spectral envelope in prior to quantization of the LP residual. Experimental result shows that, the proposed algorithm allocates bits appropriately for insufficient bits condition and improves the performance of HE-AAC.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.389-395
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• 2000

Digital Watermarking is a research area which aims at hiding secret information in digital multimedia content such as images, audio, and video. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking method with visually recognizable symbols into the digital images using wavelet transform, spread spectrum method and multilevel threshold value in considering the wavelet coefficients. The information of watermark can be extracted by subtracting wavelet coefficients with the original image and the watermarked image. The results of this experiment show that the proposed algorithm was superior to other similar watermarking algorithms. We showed Watermarking algorithm in JPEG lossy compression, resizing, LSB(Least Significant Bit) masking, and filtering.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.837-856
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• 2016

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.1229-1236
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• 2009

Puretone audiometer, which is a machine used for measuring the minimum hearing threshold, can be cost-effectively implemented using computer with sound card and software. In this paper, we describe a puretone audiometer which has been designed and implemented based on a general PC with sound card. It supports air conduction and bone conduction test taking with automatic masking. It also provides multiple modes consisted of self-test, auto-test and manual test mode. Such multiple modes makes it possible to use in various environments like as home and/or hospital. Through measure of waveform of output voltage and sound pressure, we verified that puretone audiometer of this paper properly operates.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Fisheries and Ocean Technology
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.479-486
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• 2012

In order to obtain the fundamental data about the behavior of conger by underwater audible sound, this experiment was carried out to investigate the hearing ability of Conger eel Conger myriaster which was in the coast of Jeju Island by heartbeat conditioning method using pure tones coupled with a delayed electric shock. The audible range of conger eel extended from 50Hz to 300Hz with a peak sensitivity at 80Hz including less sensitivity over 200Hz. The mean auditory thresholds of conger eel at the frequencies of 50Hz, 80Hz, 100Hz, 200Hz and 300Hz were 105dB, 92dB, 96dB, 128dB and 140dB, respectively. The positive response of conger eel was not evident after the sound projection of over 200Hz. At the results, the sensitive frequency range of conger eel is narrow in spite of swim bladder. Auditory masking was determined for Conger eel by using masking stimuli with the spectrum level range of about 60~70dB (0dB re $1{\mu}Pa/\sqrt{Hz}$). According to white noise level, the auditory thresholds increased as compared with thresholds in a quiet background noise including critical ratio at 68dB of white noise from minimum 26dB to maximum 30dB at test frequencies of 80Hz and 100Hz. The noise spectrum level at the start of masking was distributed at the range of about 68dB within 80~100Hz.

• Journal of Fisheries and Marine Sciences Education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.384-390
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to improve the availability of underwater sound by the fundamental data on the hearing ability of Redlip croaker Pseudosciaena polyactis, which is cultured according to the cultivation technology, recently. The auditory thresholds of Redlip croaker were determined at 6 frequencies from 80Hz to 800Hz by heartbeat conditioning method using pure tones coupled with a delayed electric shock. The audible range of the Redlip croaker extended from 80Hz to 800Hz with the best sensitive frequency range including little difference in hearing ability from 80Hz to 500Hz. In addition, the auditory thresholds over 800Hz increased rapidly. The mean auditory thresholds of the Redlip croaker at the test frequencies from 80Hz to 800Hz were 90.7dB, 93.4dB, 92.9dB, 94.4dB, 95.5dB and 108dB, respectively. Auditory masking for the redlip croaker was measured using masking stimuli with the spectrum level range of about 66, 71, 75dB (0dB re $1{\mu}Pa/{\sqrt{Hz}}$). According to white noise level, the auditory thresholds increased as compared with thresholds in a quiet background noise. The Auditory masking by the white noise spectrum level was stared over about 70dB within 80~500Hz. Critical ratio ranged from minimum 20.7dB to maximum 25.5dB at test frequencies of 80Hz~500Hz.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.405-414
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• 2002

In this paper, we propose a new objective speech quality measure using noise masking threshold for speech quality assessment of mobile telephone network environments, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through the experiments. For such a purpose, well known objective speech quality measures such as BSD and PSQM are first evaluated for digital mobile telephone network environments. However, these conventional methods does not have good performance under mobile networks environments compared to literary results. To be mote effective objective speech quality measure under mobile telephone environments, the proposed method employs human psychoacoustic masking effect. The DMOS, instead of MOS, is used as a subjective speech quality measure for performance evaluation. The performance comparison are carried out with speech data collected from digital mobile telephone environments. As results, the proposed measure have and average 4% higher performance, in terms of correlation, than existing objective speech quality measures such as BSD and PSQM.