• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.229-236
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• 2011

In this paper we present light weighted English-to-Korean and Korean-to-English mobile translators on smart phones. For natural translation and higher translation quality, translation engines are hybridized with Translation Memory (TM) and Rule-based translation engine. In order to maximize the usability of the system, we combined an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine and Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine as a Front-End and Back-end of the mobile translators. With the BLEU and NIST evaluation metrics, the experimental results show our E-K and K-E mobile translation equality reach 72.4% and 77.7% of Google translators, respectively. This shows the quality of our mobile translators almost reaches the that of server-based machine translation to show its commercial usefulness.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.673-684
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• 2005

In this research, we have developed a "computer tutor" that mimics the human tutor with animated tutoring dialog agent and the agent was integrated to teaching-learning material for elementary science subject. The developed system is a natural language based teaching-learning system using one-to-one dialogue. The developed pedagogical dialogue teaching-learning system analysis student's answer then provides appropriate answer or questions after comparing the student's answer with elementary school level achievement. When the agent gives either question or answer it uses the TTS(Text-to-Speech) function. Also the agent has an animated human tutor face for providing more human like feedback. The developed dialogue interface has been applied to 64 6th grade students. The test results show that the test group's average score is higher than the control group by 10.797. This shows that unlike conventional web courseware, our approach that "ask-answer" process and the animated character, which has human tutor's emotional expression, attracts students and helps to immerse to the courseware.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.455-466
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to develop a school violence prevention program "Modujikimi" for young children to be embedded in IrobiQ, the teacher assistive robot. The themes of this program consisted of basic character education, bullying prevention education and sexual violence prevention education. The activity types included large group, individual and small group activities, free choice activities, and finally parents' education, which included poems, fairy tales, music, art, sharing stories. Finally, the multi modal functions of the robot were employed: image on the screen, TTS (Text To Speech), touch function, recognition of sound and recording system. The robot content was demonstrated to thirty early childhood educators whose acceptability of the content was measured using questionnaires. And also the content was applied to children in daycare center. As a result, majority of them responded positively in acceptability. The results of this study suggest that the further research is needed to improve two-way interactivity of teacher assistive robot.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.337-340
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• 2004

The exactly reproduced prosody of a TTS system is one of the key factors that affect the naturalness of synthesized speech. In general, rules about prosody had been gathered either from linguistic knowledge or by analyzing the prosodic information from natural speech. But these could not be perfect and some of them could be incorrect. So we proposed artificial neural network(ANN)s that can be trained to team the prosody of natural speech and generate it. In learning phase, let ANNs learn the pitch and energy contour of center phoneme by applying a string of phonemes in a sentence to ANNs and comparing the output pattern with target pattern and making adjustment in weighting values to get the least mean square error between them. In test phase, the estimation rates were computed. We saw that ANNs could generate the prosody of a sentence.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.138-143
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• 2015

In this paper we develop a novel human action recognition system based on communication between an ear-mounted Bluetooth camera and an action recognition server to aid scene recognition for the blind. First, if the blind capture an image of a specific location using the ear-mounted camera, the captured image is transmitted to the recognition server using a smartphone that is synchronized with the camera. The recognition server sequentially performs human detection, object detection and action recognition by analyzing human poses. The recognized action information is retransmitted to the smartphone and the user can hear the action information through the text-to-speech (TTS). Experimental results using the proposed system showed a 60.7% action recognition performance on the test data captured in indoor and outdoor environments.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.1837-1851
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• 2016

Newspaper reader mobile applications using text-to-speech (TTS) function enable blind people to read newspaper contents. But, tables cannot be easily read by the reader program because most of the tables are stored as images in the contents. Even though we try to use OCR (Optical character reader) programs to recognize letters from the table images, it cannot be simply applied to the table reading function because the table structure is unknown to the readers. Therefore, identification of exact location of each table cell that contains the text of the table is required beforehand. In this paper, we propose an efficient image processing algorithm to recognize all the cells in tables by identifying columns and rows in table images. From the cell location data provided by the table column and row identification algorithm, we can generate table structure information and table reading scenarios. Our experimental results with table images found commonly in newspapers show that our cell identification approach has 100% accuracy for simple black and white table images and about 99.7% accuracy for colored and complicated tables.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.467-474
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• 2007

This paper documents the design and implementation of an automatic creating web-site tool for the blind to build their own homepage by using both voice recognition and voice mixed technology with equal ease as the non-disabled. The blind can make voice mails, schedules, address lists and bookmarks by making use of the tool. It also facilitates communication between the non-disabled with the help of their information management system. This tool converts basic commands into voice recognition, also making an offer of text-to-speech which supports voice output. In the end, the tool will remove the blind's social isolation, allowing them to enjoy the information age like the non-disabled.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.323-332
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• 2016

A robot's recognition and diagnosis of pronunciation and its speech are the most important interactions in RALL(Robot Assisted Language Learning). This study is to verify the effectiveness of robot TTS(Text to Sound) technology in assisting Korean English language learners to acquire a native-like accent by correcting the prosodic errors they commonly make. The child English language learners' F0 range and speaking rate in the 4th grade, a prosodic variable, will be measured and analyzed for any changes in accent. We compare whether robot with the currently available TTS technology appeared to be effective for the 4th graders and 1st graders who were not under the formal English learning with native speaker from the acoustic phonetic viewpoint. Two groups by repeating TTS of RALL responded to the speaking rate rather than F0 range.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.79-87
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• 2014

In this paper, we implemented the HearCAM platform with Raspberry PI B+ model which is an open source platform. Raspberry PI B+ model consists of dual step-down (buck) power supply with polarity protection circuit and hot-swap protection, Broadcom SoC BCM2835 running at 700MHz, 512MB RAM solered on top of the Broadcom chip, and PI camera serial connector. In this paper, we used the Google speech recognition engine for recognizing the voice characteristics, and implemented the pattern matching with OpenCV software, and extended the functionality of speech ability with SVOX TTS(Text-to-speech) as the matching result talking to the microphone of users. And therefore we implemented the functions of the HearCAM for identifying the voice and pattern characteristics of target image scanning with PI camera with gathering the temperature sensor data under IoT environment. we implemented the speech recognition, pattern matching, and temperature sensor data logging with Wi-Fi wireless communication. And then we directly designed and made the shape of HearCAM with 3D printing technology.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.53-63
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• 2015

Singing voice synthesis is the generation of a song using a computer given its lyrics and musical notes. Hidden Markov models (HMM) have been proved to be the models of choice for text to speech synthesis. HMMs have also been used for singing voice synthesis research, however, a huge database is needed for the training of HMMs for singing voice synthesis. And commercially available singing voice synthesis systems which use the piano roll music notation, needs to adopt the easy to read standard music notation which make it suitable for singing learning applications. To overcome this problem, we use a speech database for training context dependent HMMs, to be used for singing voice synthesis. Pitch and duration control methods have been devised to modify the parameters of the HMMs trained on speech, to be used as the synthesis units for the singing voice. This work describes a singing voice synthesis system which uses a MusicXML based music score editor as the front-end interface for entry of the notes and lyrics to be synthesized and a hidden Markov model based text to speech synthesis system as the back-end synthesizer. A perceptual test shows the feasibility of our proposed system.