• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2007

In this paper, we present a method of detecting the boundary of the intima-media complex for automated measurement based on dynamic programming from carotid artery B-mode ultrasound images and then show the experimental results. We apply the dynamic programming for determining the optimal locations that a cost function is minimized. The cost function includes cost terms which are representing image features such as intensity, intensity gradient and geometrical continuity of the vessel interfaces. Moreover, we improve the boundary continuity by applying the B-spline to smooth the rough boundary due to noise such as speckle, dropout and weak edges. The proposed method has obtained more accurate reproducible results than conventional edge-detection by considering multiple image features and ensures efficient automated measurement by solving the problems of the inter- and intra-observer variability and its inefficiency due to manual measurement.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.97-111
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• 2009

Image-based traffic information collection systems have entered widespread adoption and use in many countries since these systems are not only capable of replacing existing loop-based detectors which have limitations in management and administration, but are also capable of providing and managing a wide variety of traffic related information. In addition, these systems are expanding rapidly in terms of purpose and scope of use. Currently, the utilization of image processing technology in the field of traffic accident management is limited to installing surveillance cameras on locations where traffic accidents are expected to occur and digitalizing of recorded data. Accurately recording the sequence of situations around a traffic accident in a signal intersection and then objectively and clearly analyzing how such accident occurred is more urgent and important than anything else in resolving a traffic accident. Therefore, in this research, we intend to present a technology capable of overcoming problems in which advanced existing technologies exhibited limitations in handling real-time due to large data capacity such as object separation of vehicles and tracking, which pose difficulties due to environmental diversities and changes at a signal intersection with complex traffic situations, as pointed out by many past researches while presenting and implementing an active and environmentally adaptive methodology capable of effectively reducing false detection situations which frequently occur even with the Gaussian complex model analytical method which has been considered the best among well-known environmental obstacle reduction methods. To prove that the technology developed by this research has performance advantage over existing automatic traffic accident recording systems, a test was performed by entering image data from an actually operating crossroad online in real-time. The test results were compared with the performance of other existing technologies.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.34-37
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• 2006

When tsunami waves propagate across open ocean they are steered by Coriolis force and refraction due to gentle gradients in the bathymetry on scales longer than the wavelength. When the wave encounters steep gradients at the edges of continental shelves and at the coast, the wave becomes non-linear and conservation of momentum produces squirts of surface current at the head of submerged canyons and in coastal bays. HF coastal ocean radar is well-conditioned to observe the current bursts at the edge of the continental shelf and give a warning of 40 minutes to 2 hours when the shelf is 50-200km wide. The period of tsunami waves is invariant over changes in bathymetry and is in the range 2-30 minutes. Wavelengths for tsunamis (in 500-3000 m depth) are in the range 8.5 to over 200 km and on a shelf where the depth is about 50 m (as in the Great Barrier Reef) the wavelengths are in the range 2.5 - 30 km. It is shown that the phased array HF ocean surface radar being deployed in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and operating in a routine way for mapping surface currents, can resolve surface current squirts from tsunamis in the wave period range 20-30 minutes and in the wavelength range greater than about 6 km. There is a trade-off between resolution of surface current speed and time resolution. If the radar is actively managed with automatic intervention during a tsunami alert period (triggered from the global seismic network) then it is estimated that the time resolution of the GBR radar may be reduced to about 2 minutes, which corresponds to a capability to detect tsunamis at the shelf edge in the period range 5-30 minutes. It is estimated that the lower limit of squirt velocity detection at the shelf edge would correspond to a tsunami with water elevation of less than 5 cm in the open ocean. This means that the GBR HF radar is well-conditioned for use as a monitor of small and medium scale tsunamis, and has the potential to contribute to the understanding of tsunami genesis research.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.183-196
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• 1996

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of automatic extraction of line feature from Satellite image. The first part reviews the relationship between spatial filtering and cartographic interpretation. The second part describes the principal operations of high frequency filters and their properties, the third part presents the result of filtering application to the SPOT Panchromatic image of the Chinju city. Some experimental results are given here indicating the high feasibility of the filtering technique. The results of the paper is summarized as follows: Firstly the good all-purposes filter dose not exist. Certain laplacian filter and Frei-chen filter were very sensitive to the noise and could not detect line features in our case. Secondly, summary filters and some other filters do an excellent job of identifying edges around urban objects. With the filtered image added to the original image, the interpretation is more easy. Thirdly, Compass gradient masks may be used to perform two-dimensional, discrete differentiation directional edge enhancement, however, in our case, the line featuring was not satisfactory. In general, the wide masks detect the broad edges and narrow masks are used to detect the sharper discontinuities. But, in our case, the difference between the $3{\times}3$ and $7{\times}7$ kernel filters are not remarkable. It may be due to the good spatial resolution of Spot scene. The filtering effect depends on local circumstance. Band or kernel size selection must be also considered. For the skillful geographical interpretation, we need to take account the more subtle qualitative information.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.26-33
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• 2006

Film restoration is to detect the location and extent of defected regions from a given movie film, and if present, to reconstruct the lost information of each region. It has gained increasing attention by many researchers, to support multimedia service of high quality. In general, an old film is degraded by dust, scratch, flick, and so on. Among these, the most frequent degradation is the scratch. So far techniques for the scratch restoration have been developed, but they have limited applicability when dealing with all kinds of scratches. To fully support the automatic scratch restoration, the system should be developed that can detect all kinds of scratches from a given frame of old films. This paper presents a neurual network (NN)-based texture classifier that automatically detect all kinds of scratches from frames in old films. To facilitate the detection of various scratch sizes, we use a pyramid of images generated from original frames by having the resolution at three levels. The image at each level is scanned by the NN-based classifier, which divides the input image into scratch regions and non-scratch regions. Then, to reduce the computational cost, the NN-based classifier is only applied to the edge pixels. To assess the validity of the proposed method, the experiments have been performed on old films and animations with all kinds of scratches, then the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.151-154
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• 1987

Total 114 patients were studied prospectively with radioiodine uptake (RAIU) and $^{99m}TcO_4^-$ thyroid scan to design a very simple, rapid and inexpensive method measuring the thyroid uptake on thyroid scan. After the RAIU was obtained at 24 hours after P.O. of $^{131}I$, Thyroid scan was performed at 20 minutes after LV. of $^{99m}TcO_4^-$ and the bilateral salivary glands were included in the scan field. Pinhole collimated and computer assisted gamma camera was used. Three regions of interest were set on each salivary gland and on the thyroid by automatic edge detection method. Mean counts per pixel were calculated for each ROI and the salivary-thyroid ratio (STR) was defined as; $$STR(%)=\frac{Mean\;counts\;per\;pixel\;of\;salivary\;glands\;(KC)}{Mean\;counts\;per\;pixel\;of\;thyroid\;gland\;(KC)}\times100$$ 114 cases consisted of 41 normal, 55 hyperthyroid and 18 hypothyroid patients and correlation between the STR and the RAID were evaluated in total and each group. The STR and the RAID showed reverse linear regression in 114 cases (r= -0.8, P=0) and closer correlation was shown in hyperthyroid group (r= -0_9, p=0). Mean STR in normal group was 47.6%. In predicting the RAID by STR, sensitivity and specificity were 88.3% and 64.9% in 114 cases and 95.3% and 83.3% in hyperthyroid group. It is recommended that the STR be used in place of the RAID giving same information at saving time, money and radiation exposure.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.205-215
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• 2024

Manually mapping fractures in construction stone mines is challenging, time-consuming, and hazardous. In this method, there is no physical access to all points. In contrast, digital image processing offers a safe, cost-effective, and fast alternative, with the capability to map all joints. In this study, two methods of detecting the trace of discontinuities using image processing in construction stone mines are presented. To achieve this, we employ two modified Hough transform algorithms and the degree of neighborhood technique. Initially, we introduced a method for selecting the best edge detector and smoothing algorithms. Subsequently, the Canny detector and median smoother were identified as the most efficient tools. To trace discontinuities using the mentioned methods, common preprocessing steps were initially applied to the image. Following this, each of the two algorithms followed a distinct approach. The Hough transform algorithm was first applied to the image, and the traces were represented through line drawings. Subsequently, the Hough transform results were refined using fuzzy clustering and reduced clustering algorithms, along with a novel algorithm known as the farthest points' algorithm. Additionally, we developed another algorithm, the degree of neighborhood, tailored for detecting discontinuity traces in construction stones. After completing the common preprocessing steps, the thinning operation was performed on the target image, and the degree of neighborhood for lineament pixels was determined. Subsequently, short lines were removed, and the discontinuities were determined based on the degree of neighborhood. In the final step, we connected lines that were previously separated using the method to be described. The comparison of results demonstrates that image processing is a suitable tool for identifying rock mass discontinuity traces. Finally, a comparison of two images from different construction stone mines presented at the end of this study reveals that in images with fewer traces of discontinuities and a softer texture, both algorithms effectively detect the discontinuity traces.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.551-561
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• 2022

Geophysical exploration methods are very useful for generating high-resolution images of underground structures, and such methods can be applied to investigation of buried cultural properties and for determining their exact locations. In this study, image feature extraction and image segmentation methods were applied to automatically distinguish the structures of buried relics from the high-resolution ground-penetrating radar (GPR) images obtained at the center of Silla Kingdom, Gyeongju, South Korea. The major purpose for image feature extraction analyses is identifying the circular features from building remains and the linear features from ancient roads and fences. Feature extraction is implemented by applying the Canny edge detection and Hough transform algorithms. We applied the Hough transforms to the edge image resulted from the Canny algorithm in order to determine the locations the target features. However, the Hough transform requires different parameter settings for each survey sector. As for image segmentation, we applied the connected element labeling algorithm and object-based image analysis using Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) in QGIS. The connected components labeled image shows the signals associated with the target buried relics are effectively connected and labeled. However, we often find multiple labels are assigned to a single structure on the given GPR data. Object-based image analysis was conducted by using a Large-Scale Mean-Shift (LSMS) image segmentation. In this analysis, a vector layer containing pixel values for each segmented polygon was estimated first and then used to build a train-validation dataset by assigning the polygons to one class associated with the buried relics and another class for the background field. With the Random Forest Classifier, we find that the polygons on the LSMS image segmentation layer can be successfully classified into the polygons of the buried relics and those of the background. Thus, we propose that these automatic classification methods applied to the GPR images of buried cultural heritage in this study can be useful to obtain consistent analyses results for planning excavation processes.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.1380-1386
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• 2007

This paper proposed an automatic recognition system of shipping container identifiers using fuzzy-based noise removal method and ART2-based self-organizing supervised learning algorithm. Generally, identifiers of a shipping container have a feature that the color of characters is blacker white. Considering such a feature, in a container image, all areas excepting areas with black or white colors are regarded as noises, and areas of identifiers and noises are discriminated by using a fuzzy-based noise detection method. Areas of identifiers are extracted by applying the edge detection by Sobel masking operation and the vertical and horizontal block extraction in turn to the noise-removed image. Extracted areas are binarized by using the iteration binarization algorithm, and individual identifiers are extracted by applying 8-directional contour tacking method. This paper proposed an ART2-based self-organizing supervised learning algorithm for the identifier recognition, which improves the performance of learning by applying generalized delta learning and Delta-bar-Delta algorithm. Experiments using real images of shipping containers showed that the proposed identifier extraction method and the ART2-based self-organizing supervised learning algorithm are more improved compared with the methods previously proposed.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.85-91
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• 2013

At present, megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT) is the only method used to correct the position of tomotherapy patients. MVCT produces extra radiation, in addition to the radiation used for treatment, and repositioning also takes up much of the total treatment time. To address these issues, we suggest the use of a video image-guided setup (VIGS) system for correcting the position of tomotherapy patients. We developed an in-house program to correct the exact position of patients using two orthogonal images obtained from two video cameras installed at $90^{\circ}$ and fastened inside the tomotherapy gantry. The system is programmed to make automatic registration possible with the use of edge detection of the user-defined region of interest (ROI). A head-and-neck patient is then simulated using a humanoid phantom. After taking the computed tomography (CT) image, tomotherapy planning is performed. To mimic a clinical treatment course, we used an immobilization device to position the phantom on the tomotherapy couch and, using MVCT, corrected its position to match the one captured when the treatment was planned. Video images of the corrected position were used as reference images for the VIGS system. First, the position was repeatedly corrected 10 times using MVCT, and based on the saved reference video image, the patient position was then corrected 10 times using the VIGS method. Thereafter, the results of the two correction methods were compared. The results demonstrated that patient positioning using a video-imaging method ($41.7{\pm}11.2$ seconds) significantly reduces the overall time of the MVCT method ($420{\pm}6$ seconds) (p<0.05). However, there was no meaningful difference in accuracy between the two methods (x=0.11 mm, y=0.27 mm, z=0.58 mm, p>0.05). Because VIGS provides a more accurate result and reduces the required time, compared with the MVCT method, it is expected to manage the overall tomotherapy treatment process more efficiently.