• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.2
• /
• pp.95-103
• /
• 2009

We investigated the perceptual structure of Korean consonants by analyzing the confusion among consonants in various vowel contexts. The 36 CV syllable types combined by 18 consonants and 2 vowels (/i/ and /u/) were presented with masking noises or in degraded intensity. The confusion data were analyzed by the INDSCAL (Individual Difference Scaling), ADCLUS (Additive Clustering) and the probability of the transmitted information. The results were compared with those of a previous study with /a/ vowel context (Bae and Kim, 2002). The overall results showed that the laryngeal features-aspiration, lax and tense-are the most salient features in the perception of Korean consonant regardless of vowel contexts, but the perceptual saliency of place features varies across vowel conditions. In high vowel (front and back vowel) contexts, sibilant consonants were perceptually salient compared to in low vowel contexts. In back vowel contexts, grave (labial and velar) consonants were perceptually salient. These findings imply that place features and vowel features strongly interact in speech perception as well as in speech production. All statistical measures from our confusion data ensured that the perceptual structure of Korean consonants correspond to the hierarchical structure suggested in the feature geometry (Clements, 1991). We discuss the link between speech perception and production as the basis of phonology.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.223-236
• /
• 2012

We develop a video processing method that allows the more advanced human perception oriented video coding. The proposed method necessarily reflects all influences by the rate-distortion based optimization and the human visual perception that is affected by the visual saliency, the limited space-time resolution and the regional moving history. For reflecting the human perceptual effects, we devise an online moving pattern classifier using the Hedge algorithm. Then, we embed the existing visual saliency into the proposed moving patterns so as to establish a human visual perception model. In order to realize the proposed human visual perception model, we extend the conventional foveation filtering method. Compared to the conventional foveation filter only smoothing less stimulus video signals, the developed foveation filter can locally smooth and enhance signals according to the human visual perception without causing any artifacts. Due to signal enhancement, the developed foveation filter more efficiently transfers the bandwidth saved at smoothed signals to the enhanced signals. Performance evaluation verifies that the proposed video processing method satisfies the overall video quality, while improving the perceptual quality by 12%~44%.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.41-58
• /
• 2003

Coronal/non-coronal asymmetry refers to the typological trend wherein coronals rather than non-coronals are more likely targets in place assimilation. Although the phenomenon has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of unmarkedness in formalistic approaches to sound patterns, the examination of rules and representations cannot answer why there should be such a process in the first place. Furthermore, the motivation of coronal/non-coronal asymmetry has remained controversial to date even in the field of phonetics. The present study investigated the listeners' perception of coronal and non-coronal stops in the context of $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ after critically reviewing the three types of phonetic accounts for coronal/non-coronal asymmetry, i.e., articulatory, perceptual, and gestural overlap accounts. An experiment was conducted to test whether the phenomenon in question may occur, given the listeners' lack of perceptual ability to identify weaker place cues in VC transitions as argued by Ohala (1990), i.e., coronals have weak place cues that cause listeners' misperception. 5pliced nonsense $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ utterances were given to 20 native speakers of English and Korean. Data analysis showed that majority of the subjects reported $C_{2}\;as\;C_{1}$. More importantly, the place of articulation of C1 did not affect the listeners' identification. Compared to non-coronals, coronals did not show a significantly lower rate of correct identifications. This study challenges the view that coronal/non-coronal asymmetry is attributable to the weak place cues of coronals, providing evidence that CV cues are more perceptually salient than VC cues. While perceptual saliency account may explain the frequent occurrence of regressive assimilation across languages, it cannot be extended to coronal/non-coronal asymmetry.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.41 no.6
• /
• pp.797-810
• /
• 2019

Image saliency detection is the basis of perceptual image processing, which is significant to subsequent image processing methods. Most saliency detection methods can detect only a single object with a high-contrast background, but they have no effect on the extraction of a salient object from images with complex low-contrast backgrounds. With the prior knowledge, this paper proposes a method for detecting salient objects by combining the boundary contrast map and the geodesics-like maps. This method can highlight the foreground uniformly and extract the salient objects efficiently in images with low-contrast backgrounds. The classical receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve, which compares the salient map with the ground truth map, does not reflect the human perception. An ROC curve with distance (distance receiver operating characteristic, DROC) is proposed in this paper, which takes the ROC curve closer to the human subjective perception. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and three low-contrast image datasets, with four evaluation methods including DROC, show that on comparing the eight state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed approach performs well.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.189-202
• /
• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new salient region detection method in an image. The algorithm is based on the characteristics of human's bottom-up visual attention. Several features known to influence human visual attention like color, intensity and etc. are extracted from the each regions of an image. These features are then converted to importance values for each region using its local competition function and are combined to produce a saliency map, which represents the saliency at every location in the image by a scalar quantity, and guides the selection of attended locations, based on the spatial distribution of saliency region of the image in relation to its Perceptual importance. Results shown indicate that the calculated Saliency Maps correlate well with human perception of visually important regions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2016.06a
• /
• pp.33-34
• /
• 2016

본 논문에서는 HVS(human visual system)의 특성을 고려한 새로운 스케일러블 코딩방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 먼저 영상 내에서 관심영역(saliency map)을 찾고 관심영역을 제외한 부분에 에지 보존 필터를 적용한다. 그 영상은 정해진 양자 파라미터 값으로 인코딩 되어 제안된 코딩 시스템의 베이스 층(base layer)이 된다. 기존 스케일러블 코딩 표준에서의 베이스 층과 다르게 본 논문의 베이스 층은 관심 있는 중요영역(foreground)을 보존하고 또한 배경(background)의 에지 성분도 보존한다. 기본 층이 전송되면 개선층(enhancement layer)은 원 영상과 복원된 베이스 층 영상간의 차분 영상에서 관심영역 순으로 보내진다. 실험은 HEVC 를 바탕으로 수행되었고 스케일러블 코딩 표준인 SHVC 와 관심영역에서 비교를 했을 때 제안된 알고리즘이 더 높은 PSNR 을 가지는 것을 확인하였다. 또한 전체적으로 지각적인 품질(perceptual quality) 또한 향상되었음을 확인하였다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.21 no.6
• /
• pp.929-943
• /
• 2016

This paper proposes the rate control algorithm based on the S-JND (Saliency-Just Noticeable Difference) model for considering perceptual visual quality. The proposed rate control algorithm employs the S-JND model to simultaneously reflect human visual sensitivity and human visual attention for considering characteristics of human visual system. During allocating bits for CTU (Coding Tree Unit) level in a rate control, the bit allocation model calculates the S-JND threshold of each CTU in a picture. The threshold of each CTU is used for adaptively allocating a proper number of bits; thus, the proposed bit allocation model can improve perceptual visual quality. For performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm, the proposed algorithm was implemented on HM 16.9 and tested for sequences in Class B and Class C under the CTC (Common Test Condition) RA (Random Access), Low-delay B and Low-delay P case. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the bit-rate of 2.3%, and improves BD-PSNR of 0.07dB and bit-rate accuracy of 0.06% on average. We achieved MOS improvement of 0.03 with the proposed method, compared with the conventional method based on DSCQS (Double Stimulus Continuous Quality Scale).

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.448-463
• /
• 2017

Multimedia is a ubiquitous and indispensable part of our daily life and learning such as audio, image, and video. Objective and subjective quality evaluations play an important role in various multimedia applications. Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is used to indicate the perceptual quality of a distorted image, while its reference image is not considered and used. Blur is one of the common image distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel BIQA index for Gaussian blur distortion based on the fact that images with different blur degree will have different changes through the same blur. We describe this discrimination from three aspects: color, edge, and structure. For color, we adopt color histogram; for edge, we use edge intensity map, and saliency map is used as the weighting function to be consistent with human visual system (HVS); for structure, we use structure tensor and structural similarity (SSIM) index. Numerous experiments based on four benchmark databases show that our proposed index is highly consistent with the subjective quality assessment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2011.07a
• /
• pp.563-564
• /
• 2011

본 논문에서 우리는 unequal loss protection(ULP) 알고리즘을 기반으로 패킷이 손실될 수 있는 망 환경에서 인지적으로 재구성된 영상의 왜곡을 최소화하는 방법을 제안한다. 알고리즘에는 2가지의 주요 요인이 있다. 첫째, 인간 시각 체계의 균일하지 않은 분포의 함수로 압축된 영상에 가중치를 준다. 둘째, 패킷은 오류 전파가 일어나지 않도록 하면서 각각의 group of picture(GOP)내에서 시간적인 중요성이 할당된다. 프레임의 인지적인 중요성과 GOP의 계층적인 중요성을 동시에 고려하여, 제안하는 ULP알고리즘은 인간 시각적으로 가장 중요한 지역의 크기를 식별하여 효율적인 forword error correction(FEC) 알고리즘을 수행한다.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.15-23
• /
• 2010

In action games such as shooting games or platform games, dodging enemy objects is crucial since the player character dies or loses energy when it collides with any enemy object. In this paper, we investigates how the difficulty of these games changes according to the existence of salient objects. Since salient objects attract the player's attention, other non-salient objects may be unattended by the player, resulting in failing to dodge them. We experimented on the influence of salient objects on the difficulty of a game, and found out that the subjects who played the game without salient objects performed better than the subjects who played the game with salient objects. This paper investigates a human perceptual issue that could affect the game difficulty and suggest a potential guideline for game design and planning.