• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.3479-3492
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• 2022

Longitudinal quantification of brain changes due to development, aging or disease plays an important role in the filed of personalized-medicine applications. However, due to the temporal variability in shape and different imaging equipment and parameters, estimating anatomical changes in longitudinal studies is significantly challenging. In this paper, a longitudinal Magnetic Resonance(MR) brain image segmentation algorithm proposed by combining intensity information and anisotropic smoothness term which contain a spatial smoothness constraint and longitudinal consistent constraint into a variational framework. The minimization of the proposed energy functional is strictly and effectively derived from a fast optimization algorithm. A large number of experimental results show that the proposed method can guarantee segmentation accuracy and longitudinal consistency in both simulated and real longitudinal MR brain images for analysis of anatomical changes over time.

• Journal of Institute of Convergence Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-5
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• 2021

Deep learning based methods achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, however, they typically rely on supervised training with large labeled datasets. It is known in many medical applications that labeling medical images requires significant expertise and much time, and typical hand-tuned approaches for data augmentation fail to capture the complex variations in such images. This paper proposes a 3D image augmentation method to overcome these difficulties. It allows us to enrich diversity of training data samples that is essential in medical image segmentation tasks, thus reducing the data overfitting problem caused by the fact the scale of medical image dataset is typically smaller. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach provides significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods for 3D medical image segmentation.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07a
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• pp.629-632
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• 2003

This paper has been studied analysis and design of microstrip Rotman lens operating over wide band and wide steering angle by the contour integral method along with the segmentation method. All mutual coupling, internal reflections between ports with exponential taper are taken into account. Equally spaced ports are designed and realized which gives less amplitude ripple at array ports. The measured results of 12 input and 12 output lens show $\pm$1.8 dB insertion loss deviation over 6~18GHz wide frequency range and beam steering accuracy less than 1$^{\circ}$ over $\pm$53$^{\circ}$ angle and agrees well with the analysis results.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.1588-1595
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• 2006

In this paper, we proposed a liver extracting procedure for computer aided liver diagnosis system. Extraction of liver region in an abdominal CT image is difficult due to interferences of other organs. For this reason, liver region is extracted in a region of interest(ROI). ROI is selected by the window which can measure the distribution of Hounsfield Unit(HU) value of liver region in an abdominal CT image. The distribution is measured by an existential probability of HU value of lever region in the window. If the probability of any window is over 50%, the center point of the window would be assigned to ROI. Actually, liver region is not clearly discerned from the adjacent organs like muscle, spleen, and pancreas in an abdominal CT image. Liver region is extracted by the watershed segmentation algorithm which is effective in this situation. Because it is very sensitive to the slight valiance of contrast, it generally produces over segmentation regions. Therefore these regions are required to merge into the significant regions for optimal segmentation. Finally, a liver region can be selected and extracted by prier information based on anatomic information.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.237-246
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• 2001

A high speed context-free marker-controlled and minima imposition-free watershed transform is proposed for efficient multi-object detection and segmentation from a complex background. The context-free markers are extracted from a complex backgrounded multi-object image using a noise tolerant attention operator. These make marker-controlled watershed possible for the over-segmentation reduction without region merging. The proposed method presents a marker-constrained labeling that can speed up the segmentation of a marker-controlled watershed transform by eliminating the necessity of the minima imposition. Simulation results show that the proposed method can efficiently detects and segments multiple objects from a complex background while reducing over- segmentation and the computation time.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.161-166
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• 2011

We present a fast algorithm for Korean text extraction and segmentation from subway signboards using smart phone sensors in order to minimize computational time and memory usage. The algorithm can be used as preprocessing steps for optical character recognition (OCR): binarization, text location, and segmentation. An image of a signboard captured by smart phone camera while holding smart phone by an arbitrary angle is rotated by the detected angle, as if the image was taken by holding a smart phone horizontally. Binarization is only performed once on the subset of connected components instead of the whole image area, resulting in a large reduction in computational time. Text location is guided by user's marker-line placed over the region of interest in binarized image via smart phone touch screen. Then, text segmentation utilizes the data of connected components received in the binarization step, and cuts the string into individual images for designated characters. The resulting data could be used as OCR input, hence solving the most difficult part of OCR on text area included in natural scene images. The experimental results showed that the binarization algorithm of our method is 3.5 and 3.7 times faster than Niblack and Sauvola adaptive-thresholding algorithms, respectively. In addition, our method achieved better quality than other methods.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.1B
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• pp.156-166
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• 2000

A rate-distortion based segmentation using recursive merging is presented, which considers texture as a homogeneity by adopting the procedure of a generalized texture approximation. The texture in a region is approximated by SA-DCT and a set of two uniform quantizers with fixed step sizes, one for DC and another for AC. Using the approximated texture, we calculated the rate-distortion based cost. The segmentation using recursive merging is performed by using the rate-distortion based cost. Experimental results for 256$\times$256 Lena show that the region-based coding using the proposed segmentation yields the PSNR improvements of 0.8~ 1.0 dB and 1.2~1.5 dB over that using the rate-distortion based segmentation with DC approximation only and JPEG, respectively.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.3180-3199
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• 2013

While non-predefined object segmentation (NDOS) distinguishes an arbitrary self-assumed object from its background, predefined object segmentation (DOS) pre-specifies the target object. In this paper, a new and novel method to segment predefined objects is presented, by globally optimizing an orientation-based objective function that measures the fitness of the object boundary, in a discretized parameter space. A specific object is explicitly described by normalized discrete sets of boundary points and corresponding normal vectors with respect to its plane shape. The orientation factor provides robust distinctness for target objects. By considering the order of transformation elements, and their dependency on the derived over-segmentation outcome, the domain of translations and scales is efficiently discretized. A branch and bound algorithm is used to determine the transformation parameters of a shape model corresponding to a target object in an image. The results tested on the PASCAL dataset show a considerable achievement in solving complex backgrounds and unclear boundary images.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.421-437
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• 2015

This paper aims to present a supervised classification algorithm based on data fusion for the segmentation of the textured images. The feature extraction method we used is based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT). In the segmentation stage, the estimated feature vector of each pixel is sent to the support vector machine (SVM) classifier for initial labeling. To obtain a more accurate segmentation result, two strategies based on information fusion were used. We first integrated decision-level fusion strategies by combining decisions made by the SVM classifier within a sliding window. In the second strategy, the fuzzy set theory and rules based on probability theory were used to combine the scores obtained by SVM over a sliding window. Finally, the performance of the proposed segmentation algorithm was demonstrated on a variety of synthetic and real images and showed that the proposed data fusion method improved the classification accuracy compared to applying a SVM classifier. The results revealed that the overall accuracies of SVM classification of textured images is 88%, while our fusion methodology obtained an accuracy of up to 96%, depending on the size of the data base.