• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.348-354
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• 2008

Segmenting vessels in lower extremity CT images is very difficult because of gray level variation, connection to bones, and their small sizes. Instead of segmenting vessels, we propose an approach that segments bones and subtracts them from the original CT images. The subtracted images can contain not only connected vessel structures but also isolated vessels, which are very difficult to detect using conventional vessel segmentation methods. The proposed method initially grows a 3-dimensional (3D) volume with a seeded region growing (SRG) using an adaptive threshold and then detects junctions and forked branches. The forked branches are classified into either bone branches or vessel branches based on appearance, shape, size change, and moving velocity of the branch. The final volume is re-grown by collecting connected bone branches. The algorithm has produced promising results for segmenting bone structures in several tens of vessel-enhanced CT image data sets of lower extremities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2018.05a
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• pp.230-231
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• 2018

Ports and coastal areas that serve as national corridors have threats such as smuggling ships, enemy infiltration ships and pirate ships. To prevent intrusion of intrusive vessels, a system is needed to continuously monitor the coastal area and detect their intrusion. However, it is difficult for surveillance personnel to identify threatened vessels while monitoring large coastal areas. In this paper, we propose a system that can monitor coastal and harbor area and automatically detect ships entering the Navigation Inhibit Area to generate alarms and classify the types of ships by image classification.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1073-1081
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• 2009

In this paper, we proposed new method to enhance choroidal vessels by suppressing retina vessels brightness. It is well-known that CNV(choroidal neovascularization) is related with sight loss. The main feature of CNV is the occurrence of new vessels in choroid. Unfortunately, because retina vessels brightness is stronger than choroidal vessels brightness in ICGA(indocynanine green angiography) image, so that the choroidal vessels were hardly recognized. Therefore, for correct diagnosis, the choroidal vessels must be enhanced in ICGA image. The proposed enhancement method consists of 3 strategies. First, the retina vessels were detected by multi scale enhancement technique, hysteresis thresholding, KNN(Kth-nearest neighbor) classification method. And then, a retina vessel mask was generated from detection result. Next, the brightness of retina vessels was suppressed by the proposed conditional region erosion method and mask region until the mask region was vanished. Finally, the brightness of choroidal vessel was enhanced on processed image. Through an experiment, we had confirmed that the proposed method was robust and efficient.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.35-43
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• 2009

In the Computer Aided Diagnosis(CAD) System, the efficient way of classifying nodules from chest CT images of a patient is to perform the classification of the remaining part after the pulmonary vessel extraction. During the pulmonary vessel extraction, due to the small difference between the vessel and nodule features in imaging studies such as CT scans after having an injection of contrast, nodule maybe extracted along with the pulmonary vessel. Therefore, the pulmonary vessel extraction method plays an important role in the nodule classification process. In this paper, we propose a nodule reclassification method based on vessel thickness analysis. The proposed method consist of four steps, lung region searching step, vessel extraction and thinning step, vessel topology formation and correction step and the reclassification of nodule in the vessel candidate step. The radiologists helped us to compare the accuracy of the CAD system using the proposed method and the accuracy of general one. Experimental results show that the proposed method can extract pulmonary vessels and reclassify false-positive nodules accurately.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.91-98
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• 2016

Detection and classification of underwater objects in sonar imagery are challenging problems. This paper proposes a system that detects and identifies underwater objects at the sea floor level using a sonar image and image processing techniques. The identification process of underwater objects consists of two steps; detection of candidate regions and identification of underwater objects. The candidate regions of underwater objects are extracted by image registration through the detection of common feature points between the reference background image and the current scanning image. And then, underwater objects are identified as the closest pattern within the database using eigenvectors and eigenvalues as features. The proposed system is expected to be used in efficient securement of Q route in vessel navigation.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1463-1478
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• 2022

Maritime transport accounts for 99.7% of the exports and imports of the Republic of Korea; therefore, developing a vessel monitoring system for efficient operation is of significant interest. Several studies have focused on tracking and monitoring vessel movements based on automatic identification system (AIS) data; however, ships without AIS have limited monitoring and tracking ability. High-resolution optical satellite images can provide the missing layer of information in AIS-based monitoring systems because they can identify non-AIS vessels and small ships over a wide range. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate vessel monitoring and small vessel classification systems using high-resolution optical satellite images. This study examined the possibility of developing ship monitoring systems using Compact Advanced Satellite 500-1 (CAS500-1) satellite images by first training a deep learning model using satellite image data and then performing detection in other images. To determine the effectiveness of the proposed method, the learning data was acquired from ships in the Yellow Sea and its major ports, and the detection model was established using the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm. The ship detection performance was evaluated for a domestic and an international port. The results obtained using the detection model in ships in the anchorage and berth areas were compared with the ship classification information obtained using AIS, and an accuracy of 85.5% and 70% was achieved using domestic and international classification models, respectively. The results indicate that high-resolution satellite images can be used in mooring ships for vessel monitoring. The developed approach can potentially be used in vessel tracking and monitoring systems at major ports around the world if the accuracy of the detection model is improved through continuous learning data construction.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.7 no.9
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• pp.345-350
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• 2018

This study is an algorithm for detecting vein pattern features important for finger vein recognition. The feature detection algorithm is important because it greatly affects recognition results in pattern recognition. The recognition rate is degraded because the reference is changed according to the finger position change. In addition, the image obtained by irradiating the finger with infrared light is difficult to separate the image background and the blood vessel pattern, and the detection time is increased because the image preprocessing process is performed. For this purpose, the presented algorithm can be performed without image preprocessing, and the detection time can be reduced. SWDA (Down Slope Trace Waveform) algorithm is applied to the finger vein images to detect the fingertip position and vein pattern. Because of the low infrared transmittance, relatively dark vein images can be detected with minimal detection error. In addition, the fingertip position can be used as a reference in the classification stage to compensate the decrease in the recognition rate. If we apply algorithms proposed to various recognition fields such as palm and wrist, it is expected that it will contribute to improvement of biometric feature detection accuracy and reduction of recognition performance time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.294-296
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• 2022

Atherosclerosis is a chronic vascular inflammatory disease in which plaque builds up in the arteries and impairs blood flow. This can lead to heart disease and stroke. Since most people do not have any symptoms until the artery is severely narrowed, early detection of atherosclerosis is critical. In this paper, in order to effectively detect atherosclerotic lesions in tube-shaped blood vessels, polar conversion is applied to MRI images based on the vessel center. We then propose a SE-LSTMNet model using continuous signal information for each angle of a polar coordinate image. The trained model showed classification performance of 0.9194 accuracy, 0.9370 sensitivity, 0.8796 specificity, 0.8700 F1 score, and 0.9719 AUC on the validation data.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1764-1776
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• 2021

Objective: This study aimed to validate a deep learning-based fully automatic calcium scoring (coronary artery calcium [CAC]_auto) system using previously published cardiac computed tomography (CT) cohort data with the manually segmented coronary calcium scoring (CAC_hand) system as the reference standard. Materials and Methods: We developed the CAC_auto system using 100 co-registered, non-enhanced and contrast-enhanced CT scans. For the validation of the CAC_auto system, three previously published CT cohorts (n = 2985) were chosen to represent different clinical scenarios (i.e., 2647 asymptomatic, 220 symptomatic, 118 valve disease) and four CT models. The performance of the CAC_auto system in detecting coronary calcium was determined. The reliability of the system in measuring the Agatston score as compared with CAC_hand was also evaluated per vessel and per patient using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and Bland-Altman analysis. The agreement between CAC_auto and CAC_hand based on the cardiovascular risk stratification categories (Agatston score: 0, 1-10, 11-100, 101-400, > 400) was evaluated. Results: In 2985 patients, 6218 coronary calcium lesions were identified using CAC_hand. The per-lesion sensitivity and false-positive rate of the CAC_auto system in detecting coronary calcium were 93.3% (5800 of 6218) and 0.11 false-positive lesions per patient, respectively. The CAC_auto system, in measuring the Agatston score, yielded ICCs of 0.99 for all the vessels (left main 0.91, left anterior descending 0.99, left circumflex 0.96, right coronary 0.99). The limits of agreement between CAC_auto and CAC_hand were 1.6 ± 52.2. The linearly weighted kappa value for the Agatston score categorization was 0.94. The main causes of false-positive results were image noise (29.1%, 97/333 lesions), aortic wall calcification (25.5%, 85/333 lesions), and pericardial calcification (24.3%, 81/333 lesions). Conclusion: The atlas-based CAC_auto empowered by deep learning provided accurate calcium score measurement as compared with manual method and risk category classification, which could potentially streamline CAC imaging workflows.