• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.64-75
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• 2003

Medical image segmentation is the process by which an original image is partitioned into some homogeneous regions like bones, soft tissues, etc. This study demonstrates an automatic medical image segmentation technique based on independent component analysis. Independent component analysis is a generalization of principal component analysis which encodes the higher-order dependencies in the input in addition to the correlations. It extracts statistically independent components from input data. Use of automatic medical image segmentation technique using independent component analysis under the assumption that medical image consists of some statistically independent parts leads to a method that allows for more accurate segmentation of bones from CT data. The result of automatic segmentation using independent component analysis with square test data was evaluated using probability of error(PE) and ultimate measurement accuracy(UMA) value. It was also compared to a general segmentation method using threshold based on sensitivity(True Positive Rate), specificity(False Positive Rate) and mislabelling rate. The evaluation result was done statistical Paired-t test. Most of the results show that the automatic segmentation using independent component analysis has better result than general segmentation using threshold.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2017

Enlargement of the lateral ventricles have been identified as a surrogate marker of neurological disorders. Quantitative measure of the lateral ventricle from MRI would enable earlier and more accurate clinical diagnosis in monitoring disease progression. Even though it requires an automated or semi-automated segmentation method for objective quantification, it is difficult to define lateral ventricles due to insufficient contrast and brightness of structural imaging. In this study, we proposed a fully automated lateral ventricle segmentation method based on a graph cuts algorithm combined with atlas-based segmentation and connected component labeling. Initially, initial seeds for graph cuts were defined by atlas-based segmentation (ATS). They were adjusted by partial volume images in order to provide accurate a priori information on graph cuts. A graph cuts algorithm is to finds a global minimum of energy with minimum cut/maximum flow algorithm function on graph. In addition, connected component labeling used to remove false ventricle regions. The proposed method was validated with the well-known tools using the dice similarity index, recall and precision values. The proposed method was significantly higher dice similarity index ($0.860{\pm}0.036$, p < 0.001) and recall ($0.833{\pm}0.037$, p < 0.001) compared with other tools. Therefore, the proposed method yielded a robust and reliable segmentation result.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.472-478
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• 2012

The inspection machine in PCB (printed circuit board) assembly line checks assembly errors by inspecting the images inside of the component inspection region. The component inspection region consists of region of component package and region of soldering. It is necessary to extract the regions automatically for auto-teaching system of the inspection machine. We propose an image segmentation method to extract the component inspection regions automatically from images of PCB. The acquired image is transformed to HSI color model, and then segmented by several regions by clustering method. We develop a modified K-means algorithm to increase the accuracy of extraction. The heuristics generating the initial clusters and merging the final clusters are newly proposed. The vertical and horizontal projection is also developed to distinguish the region of component package and region of soldering. The experimental results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2005

Identifying color codes needs precise color information of their constituents, and is far from trivial because colors usually suffer severe distortions throughout the entire procedures from printing to acquiring image data. To accomplish accurate identification of colors, we need a reliable segmentation method to separate different color regions from each other, which would enable us to process the whole pixels in the region of a color statistically, instead of a subset of pixels in the region. Color image segmentation can be accomplished by performing edge detection on component image(s). In this paper, we separately detected edges on component images from RGB, HSI, and YIQ color models, and performed mathematical analyses and experiments to find out a pair of component images that provided the best edge image when combined. The best result was obtained by combining Y- and R-component edge images.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.427-430
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• 1995

This paper proposes a new image processing algorithm to recognize korean documents. It take out the region of syllable area from input character image, then it makes recognition of a consonant and a vowel in the character. A precision segmentation is very important to recognize the input character. The input image has 8-bit gray scaled resolution. Not only the shape but also vertical and horizontal lines dispersion graph are used for segmentation. Theresult shows a higher accuracy of character segmentation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.1279-1287
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• 2018

In this paper, a new type of color coordinate conversion is proposed as modified CIEXYZ from RGB to compress the color gamut. The proposed segmentation includes principal component analysis for the optimal projection of a feature vector into a one-dimensional feature. The final step adopted for lip segmentation is Otsu's threshold for a two-class problem. The performance of the proposed method was better than that of conventional methods, especially for the chromatic feature.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.560-569
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• 2002

The segmentation has been performed to the data of good quality in most cases, so the adoption of previous segmentation theory to the measured data with a laser scanner does not produce good result because of the characteristics of the data with noise component. A new approach to perform the segmentation on the scanned data is introduced to deal with problems during reverse engineering process. A triangular net is generated from measured point data, and the segmentation on it is classified as plane, smooth and rough segment. The segmentation result in each segment depends on the user-defined criteria. And the difference of the segmentation between the data of good quality and the data with noise is described and analyzed with several real models. The segment boundaries selected are used to maintain the characteristics of the parts during modeling process, thus they contribute to the automation of the reverse engineering.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.619-622
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• 1999

This paper describes a new semi-automatic segmentation algorithm based on color information. Semi-automatic segmentation mainly consists of intra-frame segmentation and inter-frame segmentation. While intra-frame segmentation extracts video objects of interest from boundary information provided by the user and intensity information of the image, inter-frame segmentation partitions the image into the video objects and background by tracking the motion of video objects. For inter-frame segmentation, color information (Y, Cb and Cr) of the current frame can be used efficiently in order to find the exact boundary of the video objects. In this paper we propose a new region growing algorithm which can maximize the ability of region differentiation, while preserving features of each color component.