• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.113-123
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• 2012

Recently, various attempts have been made to apply Intelligent Transportation System under various environments and conditions. Consequently, an accurate license plate recognition regardless of vehicle location and viewing angle is required. In this paper, we propose a novel license plate recognition system which exploits a) the format of license plates to remove false candidates of license plates and to extract characters in license plates and b) the characteristics of Hangul for accurate character recognition. In order to eliminate false candidates of license plates, the proposed method first aligns the candidates of license plates horizontally, and compares the position and the shape of objects in each candidate with the prior information of license plates provided by Korean Ministry of Construction & Transportation. The prior information such as aspect ratio, background color, projection image is also used to extract characters in license plates accurately applying an improved local binarization considering luminance variation of license plates. In case of recognizing Hangul in license plates, they are initially grouped according to their shape similarity. Then a super-class method, a hierarchical analysis based on key feature points is applied to recognize Hangul accurately. The proposed method was verified with high recognition rate regardless of background image, which eventually proves that the proposed LPR system has high performance regardless of the vehicle location or viewing angle.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.137-142
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• 2010

Although multi-model speech recognizer has been shown to be quite successful in noisy speech recognition, the results were based on general speech front-ends which do not take into account noise adaptation techniques. In this paper, for the accurate evaluation of the multi-model based speech recognizer, we adopted a quite noise-robust speech front-end, AFE, which was proposed by the ETSI for the noisy DSR environment. For the performance comparison, the MTR which is known to give good results in the DSR environment has been used. Also, we modified the structure of the multi-model based speech recognizer to improve the recognition performance. N reference HMMs which are most similar to the input noisy speech are used as the acoustic models for recognition to cope with the errors in the selection of the reference HMMs and the noise signal variability. In addition, multiple SNR levels are used to train each of the reference HMMs to improve the robustness of the acoustic models. From the experimental results on the Aurora 2 databases, we could see better recognition rates using the modified multi-model based speech recognizer compared with the previous method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.4 s.304
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• pp.1-12
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• 2005

Image registration is a process to establish the spatial correspondence between images of the same scene, which are acquired at different view points, at different times, or by different sensors. This paper presents a new algorithm for robust registration of the images acquired by multiple sensors having different modalities; the EO (electro-optic) and IR(infrared) ones in the paper. The two feature-based and intensity-based approaches are usually possible for image registration. In the former selection of accurate common features is crucial for high performance, but features in the EO image are often not the same as those in the R image. Hence, this approach is inadequate to register the E0/IR images. In the latter normalized mutual Information (nHr) has been widely used as a similarity measure due to its high accuracy and robustness, and NMI-based image registration methods assume that statistical correlation between two images should be global. Unfortunately, since we find out that EO and IR images don't often satisfy this assumption, registration accuracy is not high enough to apply to some applications. In this paper, we propose a two-stage NMI-based registration method based on the analysis of statistical correlation between E0/1R images. In the first stage, for robust registration, we propose two preprocessing schemes: extraction of statistically correlated regions (ESCR) and enhancement of statistical correlation by filtering (ESCF). For each image, ESCR automatically extracts the regions that are highly correlated to the corresponding regions in the other image. And ESCF adaptively filters out each image to enhance statistical correlation between them. In the second stage, two output images are registered by using NMI-based algorithm. The proposed method provides prospective results for various E0/1R sensor image pairs in terms of accuracy, robustness, and speed.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.114-126
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• 2014

Objectives: We aimed to develop a measurement method of five metabolites of trichloroethylene (TCE) in a concurrent biological sample, e.g., trichloroacetic acid (TCA), dichloroacetic acid (DCA), S-(1,2-dichlorovinyl) glutathione (DCVG), S-(1,2-dichlorovinyl)-L-cysteine (DCVC), and N-Acetyl-S-(1,2-dichlorovinyl)-L-cysteine (NAcDCVC) and to validate the method before application to pharmacokinetic study. Methods: TCE metabolites were simultaneously analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-MS/MS) with as little as 50 ${\mu}L$ of serum and urine. DCA, TCA and NAcDCVC were extracted with diethyl ether, while DCVC and DCVG were extracted by solid phase extraction. This method was validated according to the guidelines for bioanalytical method validation of the Korean National Institute of Toxicological Research. Then, we determined the five metabolites in five strains of mice at 24 hr after exposure to 1 g TCE /kg body weight. Results: The limits of detection for the five metabolites in biological samples ranged from 0.001 to 0.076 nmol/mL, which is comparable to or better than those previously reported. Most calibration curves showed good linearity ($R^2=0.99$), and between-batch variation was less than 20% expressing acceptable robustness and reproducibility. Using this method, we found TCA and DCA were detected in all test mice at 24 hr after the oral administration while NAcDCVC and DCVC were detected in some strains, which showed strain-dependent metabolism of TCE. Conclusions: The present method could provide robust and accurate measurements of major key metabolites of TCE in biological media, which allowed concurrent analysis of TCE metabolism for limited amounts of biospecimens.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.263-272
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• 2016

Purpose: Pulse crop damage due to wild birds is a serious problem, to the extent that the rate of damage during the period of time between seeding and the stage of cotyledon reaches 45.4% on average. This study investigated a method of fundamentally blocking birds from eating crops by conducting vinyl mulching after seeding and identifying the growing locations for beans to perform punching. Methods: Infrared (IR) sensors that could measure the temperature without contact were used to recognize the locations of soybean cotyledons below vinyl mulch. To expand the measurable range, 10 IR sensors were arranged in a linear array. A sliding mechanical device was used to reconstruct the two-dimensional spatial variance information of targets. Spatial interpolation was applied to the two-dimensional temperature distribution information measured in real time to improve the resolution of the bean coleoptile locations. The temperature distributions above the vinyl mulch for five species of soybeans over a period of six days from the appearance of the cotyledon stage were analyzed. Results: During the experimental period, cases where bean cotyledons did and did not come into contact with the bottom of the vinyl mulch were both observed, and depended on the degree of growth of the bean cotyledons. Although the locations of bean cotyledons could be estimated through temperature distribution analyses in cases where they came into contact with the bottom of the vinyl mulch, this estimation showed somewhat large errors according to the time that had passed after the cotyledon stage. The detection results were similar for similar types of crops. Thus, this method could be applied to crops with similar growth patterns. According to the results of 360 experiments that were conducted (five species of bean ${\times}$ six days ${\times}$ four speed levels ${\times}$ three repetitions), the location detection performance had an accuracy of 36.9%, and the range of location errors was 0-4.9 cm (RMSE = 3.1 cm). During a period of 3-5 days after the cotyledon stage, the location detection performance had an accuracy of 59% (RMSE = 3.9 cm). Conclusions: In the present study, to fundamentally solve the problem of damage to beans from birds in the early stage after seeding, a working method was proposed in which punching is carried out after seeding, thereby breaking away from the existing method in which seeding is carried out after punching. Methods for the accurate detection of soybean growing locations were studied to allow punching to promote the continuous growth of soybeans that had reached the cotyledon stage. Through experiments using multiple IR sensors and a sliding mechanical device, it was found that the locations of the crop could be partially identified 3-5 days after reaching the cotyledon stage regardless of the kind of pulse crop. It can be concluded that additional studies of robust detection methods considering environmental factors and factors for crop growth are necessary.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.37-48
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• 2012

Image registration is a process to establish the spatial correspondence between the images of same scene, which are acquired at different view points, at different times, or by different sensors. In this paper, we propose an effective registration method for images acquired by multi-sensors, such as EO (electro-optic) and IR (infrared) sensors. Image registration is achieved by extracting features and finding the correspondence between features in each input images. In the recent research, the multi-sensor image registration method that finds corresponding features by exploiting NMI (Normalized Mutual Information) was proposed. Conventional NMI-based image registration methods assume that the statistical correlation between two images should be global, however images from EO and IR sensors often cannot satisfy this assumption. Therefore the registration performance of conventional method may not be sufficient for some practical applications because of the low accuracy of corresponding feature points. The proposed method improves the accuracy of corresponding feature points by combining the gradient orientation as spatial information along with NMI attributes and provides more accurate and robust registration performance. Representative experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.22 no.9
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• pp.45-59
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• 2006

The successful performance of any numerical geotechnical simulation depends on the accuracy and efficiency of the numerical implementation of constitutive model used to simulate the stress-strain (constitutive) response of the soil. The corner stone of the numerical implementation of constitutive models is the numerical integration of the incremental form of soil-plasticity constitutive equations over a discrete sequence of time steps. In this paper a well known two-surface soil plasticity model is implemented using a generalized implicit return mapping algorithm to arbitrary convex yield surfaces referred to as the Closest-Point-Projection method (CPPM). The two-surface model describes the nonlinear behavior of coarse-grained materials by incorporating a bounding surface concept together with isotropic and kinematic hardening as well as fabric formulation to account for the effect of fabric formation on the unloading response. In the course of investigating the performance of the CPPM integration method, it is proven that the algorithm is an accurate, robust, and efficient integration technique useful in finite element contexts. It is also shown that the algorithm produces a consistent tangent operator $\frac{d\sigma}{d\varepsilon}$ during the iterative process with quadratic convergence rate of the global iteration process.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.139-157
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• 2016

Bankruptcy involves considerable costs, so it can have significant effects on a country's economy. Thus, bankruptcy prediction is an important issue. Over the past several decades, many researchers have addressed topics associated with bankruptcy prediction. Early research on bankruptcy prediction employed conventional statistical methods such as univariate analysis, discriminant analysis, multiple regression, and logistic regression. Later on, many studies began utilizing artificial intelligence techniques such as inductive learning, neural networks, and case-based reasoning. Currently, ensemble models are being utilized to enhance the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction. Ensemble classification involves combining multiple classifiers to obtain more accurate predictions than those obtained using individual models. Ensemble learning techniques are known to be very useful for improving the generalization ability of the classifier. Base classifiers in the ensemble must be as accurate and diverse as possible in order to enhance the generalization ability of an ensemble model. Commonly used methods for constructing ensemble classifiers include bagging, boosting, and random subspace. The random subspace method selects a random feature subset for each classifier from the original feature space to diversify the base classifiers of an ensemble. Each ensemble member is trained by a randomly chosen feature subspace from the original feature set, and predictions from each ensemble member are combined by an aggregation method. The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifier is robust with respect to variations in the dataset but is very sensitive to changes in the feature space. For this reason, KNN is a good classifier for the random subspace method. The KNN random subspace ensemble model has been shown to be very effective for improving an individual KNN model. The k parameter of KNN base classifiers and selected feature subsets for base classifiers play an important role in determining the performance of the KNN ensemble model. However, few studies have focused on optimizing the k parameter and feature subsets of base classifiers in the ensemble. This study proposed a new ensemble method that improves upon the performance KNN ensemble model by optimizing both k parameters and feature subsets of base classifiers. A genetic algorithm was used to optimize the KNN ensemble model and improve the prediction accuracy of the ensemble model. The proposed model was applied to a bankruptcy prediction problem by using a real dataset from Korean companies. The research data included 1800 externally non-audited firms that filed for bankruptcy (900 cases) or non-bankruptcy (900 cases). Initially, the dataset consisted of 134 financial ratios. Prior to the experiments, 75 financial ratios were selected based on an independent sample t-test of each financial ratio as an input variable and bankruptcy or non-bankruptcy as an output variable. Of these, 24 financial ratios were selected by using a logistic regression backward feature selection method. The complete dataset was separated into two parts: training and validation. The training dataset was further divided into two portions: one for the training model and the other to avoid overfitting. The prediction accuracy against this dataset was used to determine the fitness value in order to avoid overfitting. The validation dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the final model. A 10-fold cross-validation was implemented to compare the performances of the proposed model and other models. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, the classification accuracy of the proposed model was compared with that of other models. The Q-statistic values and average classification accuracies of base classifiers were investigated. The experimental results showed that the proposed model outperformed other models, such as the single model and random subspace ensemble model.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.495-500
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• 2006

Satellite systems for objects positioning appeared indispensable for performing basic tasks of maritime navigation. Navigation, understood as safe and effective conducting a vehicle from one point to another, within a specific physical-geographical environment. [Kopacz, $Urba{\acute{n}}ski$, 1998]. However, the systems have not solved the problem of accessibility to reliable and highly accurate information about a position of an object, especially if surveyed toward on-shore navigational signs or in sea depth. And it's of considerable significance for many navigational tasks, carried out within the frameworks of special works performance and submarine navigation. In addition, positioning precisely the objects other than vessels, while executing hydrographical works, is not always possible with a use of any satellite system. Difficulties with GPS application show up also while positioning such off-lying dangers as wrecks, underwater and aquatic rocks also other naturaland artificial obstacles. It is caused by impossibility of surveyors approaching directly any such object while its positioning. Moreover, determination of vessels positions mutually (mutual geometrical relations) by teams carrying out one common tasks at sea, demands applying the navigational techniques other than the satellite ones. Vessels'staying precisely on specified positions is of special importance in, among the others, the cases as follows: - surveying vessels while carrying out bathymetric works, wire dragging; - special tasks watercraft in course of carrying out scientific research, sea bottom exploration etc. The problems are essential for maritime economy and the Country defence readiness. Resolving them requires applying not only the satellite navigation methods, but also the terrestrial ones. The condition for implementation of the geo-navigation methods is at present the methods development both: in aspects of their techniques and technologies as well as survey data evaluation. Now, the classical geo-navigation comprises procedures, which meet out-of-date accuracy standards. To enable meeting the present-day requirements, the methods should refer to well-recognised and still developed methods of contemporary geodesy. Moreover, in a time of computerization and automation of calculating, it is feasible to create also such software, which could be applied in the integrated navigational systems, allowing carrying out navigation, provided with combinatory systems as well as with the new positioning methods. Whereas, as regards data evaluation, there should be applied the most advanced achievements in that subject; first of all the newest, although theoretically well-recognised estimation methods, including estimation [Hampel et al. 1986; $Wi{\acute{s}}niewski$ 2005; Yang 1997; Yang et al. 1999]. Such approach to the problem consisting in positioning a vehicle in motion and solid objects under observation enables an opportunity of creating dynamic and interactive navigational structures. The main subject of the theoretical suggested in this paper is the Interactive Navigational Structure. In this paper, the Structure will stand for the existing navigational signs systems, any observed solid objects and also vehicles, carrying out navigation (submarines inclusive), which, owing to mutual dependencies, (geometrical and physical) allow to determine coordinates of this new Structure's elements and to correct the already known coordinates of other elements.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.10
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• pp.15-23
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• 2016

To support the telematics and infotainment services, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication requires a robust and reliable network. To do this, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has recently developed V2X communication. For reliable communication, accurate channel estimation should be done. However, because vehicle speed is very fast, radio channel is rapidly changed with time. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately estimate the channel. In this paper, we propose the new linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel interpolation scheme based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) sidelink system in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) environments. In our proposed reduced decision error (RDE) channel estimation scheme, LMMSE channel estimation is applied in the pilot symbol, and then in the data symbol, smoothing and LMMSE channel interpolation scheme is applied. After that, time and frequency domain averaging are applied to obtain the whole channel frequency response. In addition, the LMMSE equalizer of the receiver side can reduce the error propagation due to the decision error. Therefore, it is possible to detect the reliable data. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms currently conventional schemes in normalized mean square error (NMSE) and bit error rate (BER).