• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.379-383
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• 2015

This paper presents an approach to detect object distance with the use of the recently developed low-cost Kinect sensor. The technique is based on Kinect color depth-image processing and can be used to design various computer-vision applications, such as object recognition, video surveillance, and autonomous path finding. The proposed technique uses keypoint feature detection in the Kinect depth image and advantages of depth pixels to directly obtain the feature distance in the depth images. This highly reduces the computational overhead and obtains the pixel distance in the Kinect captured images.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.769-781
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• 2019

Dynamic displacement response of civil structures is an important index for in-construction and in-service structural condition assessment. However, accurately measuring the displacement of large-scale civil structures such as high-rise buildings still remains as a challenging task. In order to cope with this problem, a vision-based system with the use of industrial digital camera and image processing has been developed for long-distance, remote, and real-time monitoring of dynamic displacement of supertall structures. Instead of acquiring image signals, the proposed system traces only the coordinates of the target points, therefore enabling real-time monitoring and display of displacement responses in a relatively high sampling rate. This study addresses the in-situ experimental verification of the developed vision-based system on the Canton Tower of 600 m high. To facilitate the verification, a GPS system is used to calibrate/verify the structural displacement responses measured by the vision-based system. Meanwhile, an accelerometer deployed in the vicinity of the target point also provides frequency-domain information for comparison. Special attention has been given on understanding the influence of the surrounding light on the monitoring results. For this purpose, the experimental tests are conducted in daytime and nighttime through placing the vision-based system outside the tower (in a brilliant environment) and inside the tower (in a dark environment), respectively. The results indicate that the displacement response time histories monitored by the vision-based system not only match well with those acquired by the GPS receiver, but also have higher fidelity and are less noise-corrupted. In addition, the low-order modal frequencies of the building identified with use of the data obtained from the vision-based system are all in good agreement with those obtained from the accelerometer, the GPS receiver and an elaborate finite element model. Especially, the vision-based system placed at the bottom of the enclosed elevator shaft offers better monitoring data compared with the system placed outside the tower. Based on a wavelet filtering technique, the displacement response time histories obtained by the vision-based system are easily decomposed into two parts: a quasi-static ingredient primarily resulting from temperature variation and a dynamic component mainly caused by fluctuating wind load.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.687-692
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• 2018

In this paper, the development of an automotive thermal imaging camera providing image information for ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist System) and autonomous vehicles is described and an improved technique to enhance the details of the image is proposed. Thermal imaging cameras are used in various fields, such as the medical, industrial and military fields, for the purpose of temperature measurement and night vision. In automobiles, they are utilized for night vision systems. For their utilization in ADAS and autonomous vehicles, appropriate image resolution and enhanced detail are required for object recognition. In this study, a $640{\times}480$ resolution thermal imaging camera that can be applied to automobiles is developed and the BDE (Block-Range Detail Enhancement) technique is applied to improve the details of the image. In order to improve the image detail obtained in various driving environments, the block-range values between the target pixel and the surrounding 8 pixels are calculated and classified into 5 levels. Then, different factors are added or subtracted to obtain images with high utilization. The improved technique distinguishes the dark part of the image by the resulting temperature difference of 130mK and shows an improvement in the fine detail in both the bright and dark parts of the image. The developed thermal imaging camera using the improved detail enhancement technique is applied to a test vehicle and the results are presented.

• Magazine of the Korea Institute for Structural Maintenance and Inspection
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.27-35
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• 2013

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.179-189
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• 2007

Most of the seeds of cucurbitaceous rootstock species used for grafting were mainly sown by hand. This study was carried out to develop an on-line discriminating algorithm of seed direction using machine vision and an automatic seeding system. The seeding system was composed of a supplying device, feeding device, machine vision system, reversing device, seeding device and system control section. Machine vision was composed of a color CCD camera, frame grabber, image inspection chamber, lighting and personal computer. The seed image was segmented into a region of seed part and background part using thresholding technique in which H value of HSI color coordinate system. A seed direction was discriminated by comparing position between the center of circumscribed rectangle to a seed and the center of seed image. It took about 49ms to identify and redirect seed. Line-up status of seed was good the more than 95% of a sowed seed. Seeding capacity of this system was shown to be 10,140 grains per hour, which is three times faster than that of a typical worker.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.631-636
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• 2019

Over the last decade, many researchers have investigated a number of vision-based construction object detection algorithms for the purpose of construction site monitoring. However, previous methods require the ground truth labeling, which is a process of manually marking types and locations of target objects from training image data, and thus a large amount of time and effort is being wasted. To address this drawback, this paper proposes a vision-based construction object detection framework that employs an active learning technique while reducing manual labeling efforts. For the validation, the research team performed experiments using an open construction benchmark dataset. The results showed that the method was able to successfully detect construction objects that have various visual characteristics, and also indicated that it is possible to develop the high performance of an object detection model using smaller amount of training data and less iterative training steps compared to the previous approaches. The findings of this study can be used to reduce the manual labeling processes and minimize the time and costs required to build a training database.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.442-448
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• 2011

There are many research results about a self-localization technique of mobile robot. In this paper we present a self-localization technique based on the features of ceiling vision using a fisheye lens. The features obtained by SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform) can be used to be matched between the previous image and the current image and then its optimal function is derived. The fisheye lens causes some distortion on its images naturally. So it must be calibrated by some algorithm. We here propose some methods for calibration of distorted images and design of a geometric fitness model. The proposed method is applied to laboratory and aile environment. We show its feasibility at some indoor environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.12
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• pp.1259-1266
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• 2014

Road signs provide important safety information about road and traffic conditions to drivers. Road signs include not only common traffic signs but also warning information regarding unexpected obstacles and road constructions. Therefore, accurate detection and identification of road signs is one of the most important research topics related to safe driving. In this paper, we propose a 3-D vision technique to automatically detect and track road signs in a video sequence which is acquired from a stereo vision camera mounted on a vehicle. First, color information is used to initially detect the sign candidates. Second, the SVM (Support Vector Machine) is employed to determine true signs from the candidates. Once a road sign is detected in a video frame, it is continuously tracked from the next frame until it is disappeared. The 2-D position of a detected sign in the next frame is predicted by the 3-D motion of the vehicle. Here, the 3-D vehicle motion is acquired by using the 3-D pose information of the detected sign. Finally, the predicted 2-D position is corrected by template-matching of the scaled template of the detected sign within a window area around the predicted position. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect and track many types of road signs successfully. Tracking comparisons with two different methods are shown.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.75-85
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• 2013

To acquire depth information using stereo vision, it is required to find correspondence points between stereo image pair. Conventional stereo vision systems usually use two cameras to get disparity data. Therefore, conventional stereo matching methods cannot resolve the tradeoff problem between accuracy and precision with respect to the length of baseline. Besides, belief propagation method, which is being used recently, has a problem that matching performance is dependent on the fixed weight parameter ${\lambda}$. In this paper, we propose a modified belief propagation stereo matching technique based on multi-baseline stereo vision to solve the tradeoff problem. The proposed method calculates EMAD(extended mean of absolute differences) as local evidence. And proposed method decides weight parameter ${\lambda}$ adaptively to local texture information. The proposed method shows higher initial matching performance than conventional methods and reached optimum solution in less iteration. The matching performance is increased about 4.85 dB in PSNR.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1583-1600
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• 2015

When natural disasters occur, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and debris flows, they are often accompanied by various types of damages such as the collapse of buildings, broken bridges and roads, and the destruction of natural scenery. Natural disaster detection and warning is an important issue which could help to reduce the incidence of serious damage to life and property as well as provide information for search and rescue afterwards. In this study, we propose a novel computer vision technique for debris flow detection which is feature-based that can be used to construct a debris flow event warning system. The landscape is composed of various elements, including trees, rocks, and buildings which are characterized by their features, shapes, positions, and colors. Unlike the traditional methods, our analysis relies on changes in the natural scenery which influence changes to the features. The "background module" and "monitoring module" procedures are designed and used to detect debris flows and construct an event warning system. The multi-criteria decision-making method used to construct an event warring system includes gradient information and the percentage of variation of the features. To prove the feasibility of the proposed method for detecting debris flows, some real cases of debris flows are analyzed. The natural environment is simulated and an event warning system is constructed to warn of debris flows. Debris flows are successfully detected using these two procedures, by analyzing the variation in the detected features and the matched feature. The feasibility of the event warning system is proven using the simulation method. Therefore, the feature based method is found to be useful for detecting debris flows and the event warning system is triggered when debris flows occur.