• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.259-269
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit-rate code-excited linear prediction (CELP) coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameter estimation and harmonic generation, and apply this technique to a current state-of-the-art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also, its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.512-517
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• 2018

Improving voice quality is a major concern in telecommunications. In this paper, we propose a robust speech quality enhancement against background noise and packet loss at VoIP (Voice-over-IP) receiver. The proposed method combines network jitter estimation based on hybrid Markov chain, adaptive playout scheduling using the estimated jitter, and speech enhancement based on restoration of amplitude and phase to enhance the quality of the speech signal arriving at the VoIP receiver over IP network. The experimental results show that the proposed method removes the background noise added to the speech signal before encoding at the sender side and provides the enhanced speech quality in an unstable network environment.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1409-1416
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• 2012

An image segmentation result depends on pre-processing steps such as contrast enhancement, edge detection, and smooth filtering etc. Especially medical images are low contrast and contain some noises. Therefore, the contrast enhancement and noise removal techniques are required in the pre-processing. In this study, we present an extension by a novel histogram equalization in which both local and global contrast is enhanced using neighborhood metrics. When checking neighborhood information, filters can simultaneously improve image quality. Most important is that original image information can be used for both global brightness preserving and local contrast enhancement, and image quality improvement filtering. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed method is more effective than other similar techniques reported previously.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.60-67
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• 2015

This paper proposes an image-dependent color image enhancement method that uses adaptive luminance enhancement and color emphasis. It effectively enhances details of low-light regions while maintaining well-balanced luminance and color information. To compare the structure similarity and naturalness, we used the tone mapped image quality index (TMQI). The proposed method maintained better structure similarity in the enhanced image than did the space-variant luminance map (SVLM) method or the adaptive and integrated neighborhood dependent approach for nonlinear enhancement (AINDANE). The proposed method required the smallest computation time among the three algorithms. The proposed method can be easily implemented using the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), with low hardware resources and with better performance in terms of similarity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.87-92
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• 2012

Speech enhancement aims to improve speech quality by removing background noise from noisy speech. Independent vector analysis is a type of frequency-domain independent component analysis method that is known to be free from the frequency bin permutation problem in the process of blind source separation from multi-channel inputs. This paper proposed a new method of microphone array based speech enhancement that combines independent vector analysis and beamforming techniques. Independent vector analysis is used to separate speech and noise components from multi-channel noisy speech, and delay-sum beamforming is used to determine the enhanced speech among the separated signals. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments for computer simulated multi-channel noisy speech with various signal-to-noise ratios were carried out, and both PESQ and output signal-to-noise ratio were obtained as objective speech quality measures. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method is superior to the conventional microphone array based noise removal approach like GSC beamforming in the speech enhancement.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.585-589
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• 2018

Consumer demand for high quality image/video services led to growing trend in image quality enhancement study. Therefore, recent years was a period of substantial progress in this research field. Through careful observation of the image quality after processing by image enhancement algorithms, we perceived that the dark region in the image usually suffered loss of contrast to a certain extent. In this paper, the low-light stretch preprocessing algorithm is, hence, proposed to resolve the aforementioned issue. The proposed approach is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively against the well-known histogram equalization and Photoshop curve adjustment. The evaluation results validate the efficiency and superiority of the low-light stretch over the benchmarking methods. In addition, we also propose the 255MHz-capable hardware implementation to ease the process of incorporating low-light stretch into real-time imaging systems, such as aerial surveillance and monitoring with drones and driving aiding systems.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.770-773
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• 2015

The contrast of the intensity components of color images usually needs to be improved in order to enhance the visual quality of color images. However, pure color regions can be saturated due to the excessive enhancement of that color. In this paper, a new method for enhancing the visual quality of color images using saturation components in the HSI color space is proposed, and the same enhancement technique in the YCbCr color space is proposed. Computer simulations show that the proposed method provides improved visual quality compared to the conventional methods.

• Korean Journal of Organic Agriculture
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.543-558
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to analyze the amount of willingness to pay for environment-friendly agricultural processed foods by the level of consumption intention. To accomplish the objective of the study a consumer survey was conducted for quantitative analysis regarding consumption pattern. The ordered-probit selection model, Heckman-type two-stage method was employed for an empirical analysis on determining the amount of willingness to pay. The estimation results showed that in the case of consumers who are to keep their consumption at the present level, those with high quality contentment compared to price, brand contentment, and purchasing chiefly in the special store, have the higher amount of willingness. The estimation results also showed that in the case of consumers who are to increase their consumption, those with high quality contentment compared to price, brand contentment, certificate contentment, and having family members who suffer from diseases such as atopy, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, have the higher amount of willingness. Therefore For those who are to increase their consumption, enhancement of quality, enhancement of contentment with certificate, promotion are useful to increase the amount of willingness to pay.

• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.532-539
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cooking wine's functions on food quality attributes. factor analysis, reliability analysis (Cronbach's $\alpha$), and multiple regression analysis were employed to analyze the data. The cooking wine functions were divided into 3 factors (expectation of utility, functionality, and quality enhancement). According to the multiple regression analysis of cooking wine factors to food quality, all factors had positive influences on food quality. Among the three factors, expectation of utility(=.556, p<0.001) had the most significant influence on food quality. And functionality (=.321, p<0.001) and quality enhancement(=.296, p<=0.001) also had significant effects in that order. further research should be conducted on cooking wine's utility aspects and their effects on food quality. Finally, we anticipate that the results of this study will be useful information for food-service companies.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.417-426
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• 2023

To improve the effect of image restoration and solve the image detail loss, an image dehazing enhancement algorithm based on mean guided filtering is proposed. The superpixel calculation method is used to pre-segment the original foggy image to obtain different sub-regions. The Ncut algorithm is used to segment the original image, and it outputs the segmented image until there is no more region merging in the image. By means of the mean-guided filtering method, the minimum value is selected as the value of the current pixel point in the local small block of the dark image, and the dark primary color image is obtained, and its transmittance is calculated to obtain the image edge detection result. According to the prior law of dark channel, a classic image dehazing enhancement model is established, and the model is combined with a median filter with low computational complexity to denoise the image in real time and maintain the jump of the mutation area to achieve image dehazing enhancement. The experimental results show that the image dehazing and enhancement effect of the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages, can retain a large amount of image detail information, and the values of information entropy, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity are high. The research innovatively combines a variety of methods to achieve image dehazing and improve the quality effect. Through segmentation, filtering, denoising and other operations, the image quality is effectively improved, which provides an important reference for the improvement of image processing technology.