• Applied Microscopy
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• v.50
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• pp.25.1-25.11
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• 2020

Scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) or Acoustic Micro Imaging (AMI) is a powerful, non-destructive technique that can detect hidden defects in elastic and biological samples as well as non-transparent hard materials. By monitoring the internal features of a sample in three-dimensional integration, this technique can efficiently find physical defects such as cracks, voids, and delamination with high sensitivity. In recent years, advanced techniques such as ultrasound impedance microscopy, ultrasound speed microscopy, and scanning acoustic gigahertz microscopy have been developed for applications in industries and in the medical field to provide additional information on the internal stress, viscoelastic, and anisotropic, or nonlinear properties. X-ray, magnetic resonance, and infrared techniques are the other competitive and widely used methods. However, they have their own advantages and limitations owing to their inherent properties such as different light sources and sensors. This paper provides an overview of the principle of SAM and presents a few results to demonstrate the applications of modern acoustic imaging technology. A variety of inspection modes, such as vertical, horizontal, and diagonal cross-sections have been presented by employing the focus pathway and image reconstruction algorithm. Images have been reconstructed from the reflected echoes resulting from the change in the acoustic impedance at the interface of the material layers or defects. The results described in this paper indicate that the novel acoustic technology can expand the scope of SAM as a versatile diagnostic tool requiring less time and having a high efficiency.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.8
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• pp.3188-3198
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• 2024

Efficient and secure decommissioning of nuclear facilities demands advanced technologies. In this context, gamma-ray detection and imaging are crucial in identifying radioactive hotspots and monitoring radiation levels. Our study is dedicated to developing a gamma-ray detection system tailored for integration into robotic platforms for nuclear decommissioning, offering a safe and automated solution for this intricate task and ensuring the safety of human operators by mitigating radiation exposure and streamlining hotspot localization. Our approach integrates a Compton camera based 3D reconstruction algorithm with a single Timepix3 detector. This eliminates the need for a second detector and significantly reduces system weight and cost. Additionally, combining a 3D camera with the setup enhances hotspot visualization and interpretation, rendering it an ideal solution for practical nuclear decommissioning applications. In a proof-of-concept measurement utilizing a 137Cs source, our system accurately localized and visualized the source in 3D with an angular error of 1° and estimated the activity with a 3% relative error. This promising result underscores the system's potential for deployment in real-world decommissioning settings. Future endeavors will expand the technology's applications in authentic decommissioning scenarios and optimize its integration with robotic platforms. The outcomes of our study contribute to heightened safety and accuracy for nuclear decommissioning works through the advancement of cost-effective and efficient gamma-ray detection systems.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2024.07a
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• pp.769-774
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• 2024

The availability of PMT(Project Management Tool) in the market has been increasing rapidly in recent years and Significant advancements have been made for project managers to use for planning, monitoring, and control. Recently, studies applying the Reinforcement-Learning Based Construction Schedule Simulation algorithm for construction project process planning/management are increasing. When reinforcement learning is applied, the agent recognizes the current state and learns to select the action that maximizes the reward among selectable actions. However, if the action of global optimal points is not selected in simulation selection, the local optimal resource may receive continuous compensation (+), which may result in failure to reach the global optimal point. In addition, there is a limitation that the optimization time can be long as numerous iterations are required to reach the global optimal point. Therefore, this study presented a method to improve optimization performance by increasing the probability that a resource with high productivity and low unit cost is selected, preventing local optimization, and reducing the number of iterations required to reach the global optimal point. In the performance evaluation process, we demonstrated that this method leads to closer approximation to the optimal value with fewer iterations.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.497-510
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• 2022

Agricultural reservoirs are essential structures for water supplies during dry period in the Korean peninsula, where water resources are temporally unequally distributed. For efficient water management, systematic and effective monitoring of medium-small reservoirs is required. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides a way for continuous monitoring of those, with its capability of all-weather observation. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of SAR in monitoring medium-small reservoirs using Sentinel-1 (10 m resolution) and Capella X-SAR (1 m resolution), at Chari (CR), Galjeon (GJ), Dwitgol (DG) reservoirs located in Ulsan, Korea. Water detected results applying Z fuzzy function-based threshold (Z-thresh) and Chan-vese (CV), an object detection-based segmentation algorithm, are quantitatively evaluated using UAV-detected water boundary (UWB). Accuracy metrics from Z-thresh were 0.87, 0.89, 0.77 (at CR, GJ, DG, respectively) using Sentinel-1 and 0.78, 0.72, 0.81 using Capella, and improvements were observed when CV was applied (Sentinel-1: 0.94, 0.89, 0.84, Capella: 0.92, 0.89, 0.93). Boundaries of the waterbody detected from Capella agreed relatively well with UWB; however, false- and un-detections occurred from speckle noises, due to its high resolution. When masked with optical sensor-based supplementary images, improvements up to 13% were observed. More effective water resource management is expected to be possible with continuous monitoring of available water quantity, when more accurate and precise SAR-based water detection technique is developed.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.137-143
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• 2013

The high resolution satellite images are used in many fields such as weather observation, remote sensing, military facilities monitoring, cultural properties protection etc. Although satellite images are obtained in same satellite imaging system, the satellite images are degraded depending on the condition of hardware(optical device, satellite operation altitude, image sensor, etc.). Due to the fact that changing the hardware of satellite imaging system is impossible for resolution enhancement of these degraded satellite after launching a satellite, therefore the method of resolution enhancement with satellite images is necessary. In this paper the resolution is enhances by using a Super Resolution(SR) algorithm. The SR algorithm is an algorithm to enhance the resolution of an image by uniting many low resolution images, so an output image has higher resolution than using other interpolation methods. But It is difficult to obtain many images of the same area. Therefore, to solve this problem, we applied SR after by applying the affine and projection transform. As a results, we found that the images applied SR after affine and projection transform have higher resolution than the images only applied SR.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.28-39
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• 2003

This paper is an overview of research contributions by the authors to the use of compression techniques to handle high resolution, multi-spectral images. Originally developed in the remote sensing context, the same techniques are here applied to food and medical images. The objective is to point out the potential of this kind of processing in different contexts such as remote sensing, food monitoring, and medical imaging and to stimulate new research exploitations. Compression is based on the simple assumption that it is possible to find out a relationship between pixels close one each other in multi-spectral images it translates to the possibility to say that there is a certain degree of correlation within pixels belonging to the same band in a close neighbourhood. Once found a correlation based on certain coefficient on one band, the coefficients of this relationship are, in turn, quite probably, similar to the ones calculated in one of the other bands. Based upon this second observation, an algorithm was developed, able to reduce the number of bit/pixel from 16 to 4 in satellite remote sensed multi-spectral images. A comparison is carried out between different methods about their speed and compression ratio. As reference it was taken the behaviour of three common algorithms, LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch), Huffman and RLE (Run Length Encoding), as they are used in common graphic format such as GIF, JPEG and PCX. The Presented methods have similar results in both speed and compression ratio to the commonly used programs and are to be preferred when the decompression must be carried out on line, inside a main program or when there is the need of a custom made compression algorithm.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.459-466
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• 2011

Sleep diseases such as snoring and sleep apnea are physically, mentally harmful and results serious health problems. Snoring, known as breathing noise, is caused by coupled oscillation of the airway when the air passes through the trachea, and sleep apnea is caused by upper airway blockage. In order to solve these problems, many attempts have been made to detect the snoring during sleep and alleviate it. In this study, a new sensing system and analysis algorithm were developed in order to detect snoring sounds correctly under various sleep environments. Two polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) vibration sensors were used inside the pillow. The first PVDF sensor detects vibration transmitted through skull caused by snoring. And the second PVDF sensor detects both snoring sounds and ambient noises. The signals of two sensors were acquired through the designed analog circuits, and analyzed for snoring detection. Ten volunteers were participated for the experiment under five different conditions. Data from two PVDF sensors were processed by the established analysis algorithm, and snoring sounds were compared to noises. The results indicated that the energy of snoring is 70% bigger than that of ambient noise, which proves effectiveness of sensing system and analysis algorithm. Further study would be continued for more wide clinical studies with various environment noises. Based on this study, development of anti-snore pillow and sleep monitoring system for comfort sleep could be developed.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.143-151
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• 2016

The aim of this study is to investigate the optimal algorithm to extract medical radiation induced pixel signal from complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors of smartphones camera. The pixel intensity and pixel number of smartphone camera were measured as the X-ray dose was increased. The front camera of the smartphone camera has low noise property and excellent dose response as compared to the back camera of the smartphone. The indirect method which uses scintillation crystal in front of the smartphone camera, couldn't improve the X-ray detection efficiency as compared to the direct method which does not use any scintillator in front of the smartphone camera. When we used the algorithm which employing threshold level on the pixel intensity and pixel number, the dose linearity was more higher for the pixel intensity rather for the pixel number. The use of pixel intensity of Y color component which represents the grey scale, would be efficient in terms of the radiation detection efficiency and reducing the complexity of the image processing. We expect that the radiation dose monitoring can be managed effectively and systematically by using the proposed radiation detection algorithm, thus eventually will contribute to the public healthcare.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.63-69
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• 2013

Change detection technique is essential to various applications of Very High-Resolution(VHR) satellite imagery and land monitoring. However, change detection accuracy of VHR satellite imagery can be decreased due to various geometrical dissimilarity. In this paper, the existing fusion evaluation indexes were revised and applied to improve VHR imagery based change detection accuracy between multi-temporal images. In addition, appropriate change detection methodology of VHR images are proposed through comparison of general change detection algorithm with cross-sharpened image based change detection algorithm. For these purpose, ERGAS, UIQI and SAM, which were representative fusion evaluation index, were applied to unsupervised change detection, and then, these were compared with CVA based change detection result. Methodologies for minimizing the geometrical error of change detection algorithm are analyzed through evaluation of change detection accuracy corresponding to image fusion method, also. The experimental results are shown that change detection accuracy based on ERGAS index by using cross-sharpened images is higher than these based on other estimation index by using general fused image.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.185-185
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• 2011

Mapping of artificial levee lines, one of major tasks in river zone mapping, is critical to prevention of river flood, protection of environments and eco systems in river zones. Thus, mapping of artificial levee lines is essential for management and development of river zones. Coastal mapping including river zone mapping has been historically carried out using surveying technologies. Photogrammetry, one of the surveying technologies, is recently used technology for national river zone mapping in Korea. Airborne laser scanning has been used in most advanced countries for coastal mapping due to its ability to penetrate shallow water and its high vertical accuracy. Due to these advantages, use of LiDAR data in coastal mapping is efficient for monitoring and predicting significant topographic change in river zones. This paper introduces a method for construction of a 3D artificial levee line using a set of LiDAR points that uses normal vectors. Multiple steps are involved in this method. First, a 2.5-dimensional Delaunay triangle mesh is generated based on three nearest-neighbor points in the LiDAR data. Second, a median filtering is applied to minimize noise. Third, edge selection algorithms are applied to extract break edges from a Delaunay triangle mesh using two normal vectors. In this research, two methods for edge selection algorithms using hypothesis testing are used to extract break edges. Fourth, intersection edges which are extracted using both methods at the same range are selected as the intersection edge group. Fifth, among intersection edge group, some linear feature edges which are not suitable to compose a levee line are removed as much as possible considering vertical distance, slope and connectivity of an edge. Sixth, with all line segments which are suitable to constitute a levee line, one river levee line segment is connected to another river levee line segment with the end points of both river levee line segments located nearest horizontally and vertically to each other. After linkage of all the river levee line segments, the initial river levee line is generated. Since the initial river levee line consists of the LiDAR points, the pattern of the initial river levee line is being zigzag along the river levee. Thus, for the last step, a algorithm for smoothing the initial river levee line is applied to fit the initial river levee line into the reference line, and the final 3D river levee line is constructed. After the algorithm is completed, the proposed algorithm is applied to construct the 3D river levee line in Zng-San levee nearby Ham-Ahn Bo in Nak-Dong river. Statistical results show that the constructed river levee line generated using a proposed method has high accuracy in comparison to the ground truth. This paper shows that use of LiDAR data for construction of the 3D river levee line for river zone mapping is useful and efficient; and, as a result, it can be replaced with ground surveying method for construction of the 3D river levee line.