• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.512-520
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• 2019

It is quite useful to represent speeches visually for learners who study foreign languages as well as the hearing impaired who cannot directly hear speeches, and a number of researches have been presented in the literature. They remain, however, at the level of representing the characteristics of speeches using colors or showing the changing shape of lips and mouth using the animation-based representation. As a result of such approaches, those methods cannot tell the users how far their pronunciations are away from the standard ones, and moreover they make it technically difficult to develop such a system in which users can correct their pronunciation in an interactive manner. In order to address these kind of drawbacks, this paper proposes a speech visualization model based on the relative distance between the user's speech and the standard one, furthermore suggests actual implementation directions by applying the proposed model to the visualization of Korean vowels. The method extract three formants F1, F2, and F3 from speech signals and feed them into the Kohonen's SOM to map the results into 2-D screen and represent each speech as a pint on the screen. We have presented a real system implemented using the open source formant analysis software on the speech of a Korean instructor and several foreign students studying Korean language, in which the user interface was built using the Javascript for the screen display.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.53-60
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• 2021

The number of visually impaired and blind people is increasing, but braille translation textbooks for them are insufficient, which violates their rights to education despite their will. In order to guarantee their rights, this paper develops a learning system, HunMinJeomUm, that helps them access textbooks, documents, and photographs that are not available in braille, without the assistance of others. In our system, a smart phone app and web pages are designed to promote the accessibility of the blind, and a braille kit is produced using Arduino and braille modules. The system supports the following functions. First, users select documents or pictures that they want, and the system extracts the text using OCR. Second, the extracted text is converted into voice and braille. Third, a membership registration function is provided so that the user can view the extracted text. Experiments have confirmed that our system generates braille and audio outputs successfully, and provides high OCR recognition rates. The study has also found that even completely blind users can easily access the smart phone app.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.121-130
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• 2024

In this paper, we propose and design an NCS-based job matching system for individuals with disabilities. This system allows users with disabilities to access it, input basic information (personal and disability-related details), and take a simple test related to job performance. The system then provides NCS job-related information appropriate to their type and degree of disability. To effectively link various NCS-based jobs, it is essential to consider the degree of disability for each type of disability. However, most evaluation tools target specific types of disabilities or assess the vocational abilities of individuals with disabilities in a limited manner, focusing only on cognitive levels or certain physical functions. This makes it challenging to apply these tools to an NCS-based job matching system for individuals with disabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we utilize the ICF coresets for VR to assess the cognitive levels or physical functions required for performing specific jobs. Additionally, we use the NCS vocational competency evaluation tools to determine the levels of vocational competencies required for performing specific jobs. By doing so, we match NCS-based jobs according to the type and degree of disability. The proposed NCS-based job matching system relies on the user's interaction with the system, which may pose challenges for visually impaired individuals or those with intellectual and autism spectrum disabilities who have low literacy levels. Enhancing the accessibility of this system could enable individuals with disabilities to receive recommendations for NCS-based jobs that suit their vocational abilities.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.83-96
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• 2020

Traditionally social problems had been largely left to be handled by non-profit organizations, not because of lack of interests in social causes but mostly because of lack of innovative ideas to solve them in commercially viable ways. This market failure has recently been fixed by social enterprises, which manage to provide both solutions for social issues and commercially viable business models. As a result, we have been witnessing a sudden spike of public interests in these social enterprises as well as a call for empirical investigation on social enterprises by prior studies. However, empirically investigating a social enterprise has been a challenging endeavor mostly due to the insufficient number of successful social enterprises. Answering to the call in this study, we empirically investigate Goyohan Taxi, a successful social enterprise that partners with visually impaired cabdrivers and offers a taxi service, by both longitudinally interviewing the founder and adopting in vivo observation throughout the entrepreneurial journey of Goyohan Taxi. Based on the single case study method, we find that Goyohan Taxi adopts two distinctive decision-making mechanisms, the de-escalation of commitment and the orthogonality of commercial and social goals. Although generalizability of the our finding is minimal due to the limitation of single case study method, our finding contributes to the research of social entrepreneurship by offering new avenue of research in decision-making process of social entrepreneurs.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.81-89
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• 2023

In modern society, blind people face difficulties in navigating common environments such as sidewalks, elevators, and crosswalks. Research has been conducted to alleviate these inconveniences for the visually impaired through the use of visual and audio aids. However, such research often encounters limitations when it comes to practical implementation due to the high cost of wearable devices, high-performance CCTV systems, and voice sensors. In this paper, we propose an artificial intelligence fusion algorithm that utilizes low-cost video sensors integrated into smartphones to help blind people safely navigate their surroundings during walking. The proposed algorithm combines motion capture and object detection algorithms to detect moving people and various obstacles encountered during walking. We employed the MediaPipe library for motion capture to model and detect surrounding pedestrians during motion. Additionally, we used object detection algorithms to model and detect various obstacles that can occur during walking on sidewalks. Through experimentation, we validated the performance of the artificial intelligence fusion algorithm, achieving accuracy of 0.92, precision of 0.91, recall of 0.99, and an F1 score of 0.95. This research can assist blind people in navigating through obstacles such as bollards, shared scooters, and vehicles encountered during walking, thereby enhancing their mobility and safety.

• 재활복지
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.129-146
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• 2017

In an event of an emergency, such as fire in a building, visually impaired and blind people are prone to exposed to a level of danger that is greater than that of normal people, for they cannot be aware of it quickly. Current fire detection methods such as smoke detector is very slow and unreliable because it usually uses chemical sensor based technology to detect fire particles. But by using vision sensor instead, fire can be proven to be detected much faster as we show in our experiments. Previous studies have applied various image processing and machine learning techniques to detect fire, but they usually don't work very well because these techniques require hand-crafted features that do not generalize well to various scenarios. But with the help of recent advancement in the field of deep learning, this research can be conducted to help solve this problem by using deep learning-based object detector that can detect fire using images from security camera. Deep learning based approach can learn features automatically so they can usually generalize well to various scenes. In order to ensure maximum capacity, we applied the latest technologies in the field of computer vision such as YOLO detector in order to solve this task. Considering the trade-off between recall vs. complexity, we introduced two convolutional neural networks with slightly different model's complexity to detect fire at different recall rate. Both models can detect fire at 99% average precision, but one model has 76% recall at 30 FPS while another has 61% recall at 50 FPS. We also compare our model memory consumption with each other and show our models robustness by testing on various real-world scenarios.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.181-192
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to look at the fun that high school students from blind schools feel in sports programs. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 10 out of 12 blind schools nationwide, including 122 male and 102 female students. Research tools are open questionnaires and questions are as follows. - Questionnaire: "Write down three of the most interesting things about sports programs." The data analysis was done with frequency analysis and the following conclusions were drawn. First, male high school students at blind schools are able to build up their physical strength in the area of competent factors (control-self) (23, 21.5%), in the area of competent factors (7, 77.8%) and in the area of motion-related factors (competition) (24, 15.1%), and in the area of non-execution factors (26, 37.7%), Second, high school girls with visual impairments did not respond in the areas of proficiency (control-self) because of stress release (25, 26.6%), in the areas of control-tain), in the areas of movement (competition) because they were able to do various exercises (22, 15.7%), and in the areas of non-watering (environmental) (18, 37.5%). Third, in the sports program comparative analysis of high school students between genders of blind schools, boys are interested in health and physical fitness in the field of competent factors (control-self) and girls are considered to be a means of relieving stress. In the field of competent factors (control-others), boys and girls can react to a variety of sports opportunities. In the future, by studying the fun of students in the physical education program through research to find out more fun in the school physical education program, we will explore practical ways to maximize student participation and increase motivation level The educational aspect of the process, that is, the educational value provided by the physical education, should be composed of content that can change the thinking and behavior of the teacher and the student so that the program contents and operation method.