• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1296-1300
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• 2015

Ganglion cysts are commonly observed cystic tumor in association with the joints and tendons of the appendicular skeleton. In this paper we propose a method to extract ganglion cysts from ultrasound images with intelligent image processing. The method consists of fuzzy stretching preprocessing to enhance the contrast between related organs and 8-directional contour tracking to model the boundaries of the cysts and labelling procedure to compute the size of cysts. In experiment, we verified that the proposed method extracts ganglion cysts accurately from ultrasound images.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.470-474
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• 2013

Surfaced-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of 4,4'-biphenyldithiol (BPDT) has been investigated at a silver island film. Ordinary Raman (OR) spectra of neat sample in solid state and in basic solution have also been taken for comparison. The spectral feature in the SERS spectrum was similar to that for the OR spectrum in basic solution, except for the broadening of ring stretching bands indicative of the presence of surface-phenyl ring $\pi$ interaction. In contrast, only absence of the C-H stretching band with very small Raman scattering cross-section seemed not pertinent in judging the definitive orientation of molecule. The observed vibrational bands in the SERS spectrum have been assigned by referring to the normal modes and wavenumbers from density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the simple model as 4,4'-biphenyldithiolates bound to two Ag atoms at the both ends. Excellent agreement between the experimental and the calculated results was achieved, which is remarkable considering the level of theory applied.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.9-15
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a method to extract the external oblique muscle of abdomen images that is often excluded by previous method due to image distortion. In the preprocessing phase of the proposed method, we emphasize the brightness contrast with Ends-in search stretching algorithm after removing noise from the initial ultrasonic images. Then we apply average binarization in vertical direction to extract candidate fascia areas. After removing other areas than fascia with morphological characteristics, the lost part in the fascia during the process is restored with such characteristic information and location information. Then the skin area is also removed with information from the arc appearing in convex filming and the candidate muscle areas are extracted by overlapping two results two way up-down search algorithm. Another noise removing process is done to determine the muscle area. In case of obtaining obscure result, after restoring the muscle area by smearing method, the thickness of the muscle is measured by min square method. The experiment verifies that the proposed method is sufficiently effective to analyze the size and shape of muscles in abdomen in ultrasonography than previously used methods.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.13-25
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• 2022

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of combined cervical stabilization exercise (CSE) and stretching exercise (SE) on office workers with forward head posture (FHP). Methods : A total of 32 office workers with forward head posture were randomly assigned to experimental (n=16) and control (n=16) groups. The experimental group underwent combined CSE and SE, and the control group underwent cervical self-myofascial release and SE. Both groups performed exercises for 40 min per day, thrice per week for a total of 6 weeks. Craniovertebral angle (CVA), respiration, disability, and joint range of motion (ROM) before and 6 weeks after intervention were measured and compared. Results : There was no significant between-group difference in the general characteristics (p>.05). The intra-group comparison showed significant differences in the visual analog scale (VAS) and neck disability index (NDI) of both groups post-intervention (p<.05). CVA and forced expiratory volume in 1 seconds (FEV₁) were significantly improved post-intervention in the experimental group only (p<.05). In the experimental group, all ROM variables were significantly improved post-intervention. In contrast, in the control group, all ROM variables improved significantly post-intervention, except for extension (p<.05). The inter-group comparison showed significant differences in NDI, left lateral flexion, right lateral flexion, and left rotation between the two groups (p<.05). Conclusion : The combination of CSE and SE, which stabilizes the cervical spine, had positive effects on cranial rotation angle, respiration, disability, and joint ROM in office workers with forward head posture. Therefore, the combination of the two exercises may be an effective option to reduce symptoms and prevent postural problems in office workers with FHP.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.10
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• pp.1852-1859
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• 2016

The effectiveness of a binarization algorithm in image processing depends on how to eliminate the uncertainty of determining threshold in a reasonable way and on minimizing information loss due to the binarization effect. Fuzzy binarization technique was proposed to handle that uncertainty with fuzzy logic. However, that method is known to be inefficient when the given image has low intensity contrast. In this paper, we propose an improved fuzzy binarization method to overcome such known drawbacks. Our method proposes a trapezoid type fuzzy membership function instead of most-frequently used triangle type one. We also propose an adaptive ${\alpha}$_cut determination policy. Our proposed method has less information loss than other algorithms since we do not use any stretching based preprocessing for enhancing the intensity contrast. In experiment, our proposed method is verified to be more effective in binarization with less information loss for many different types of images with low intensity contrast such as night scenery, lumber scoliosis, and lipoma images.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.859-864
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• 2018

This paper is about image improvement - we used the contrast ratio and the outline emphasis method after synthesizing two low quality images utilized by several low definition cameras. Two raspberry cameras were used to capture each image, and then we synthesized images with MATLAB program. After applying the mean computation (alignment, geometry, and harmony) to synthesized image, we extracted the cross-space. In the experiment of this study, we identified and compared the improvement consequences of extracted, synthesized image after applying outline emphasis(unsharpmask filter, highboost filter) and increasing contrast ratio (histogram uniformity, histogram stretching) to the original images.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.2321-2326
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• 2011

Cervical vertebrae are a complex structure and an important part of human body connecting the head and the trunk. In this paper, we propose a method to extract sternocleidomastoid muscle from ultrasonography images of cervical vertabrae automatically. In our method, Region of Interests(ROI) is extracted first from an ultrasonography image after removing unnecessary auxiliary information such as metrics. Then we apply Ends-in search stretching algorithm in order to enhance the contrast of brightness. Average binarization is then applied to those pixels which its brightness is sufficiently large. The noise part is removed by image processing algorithms. After extracting fascia encloses sternocleidomastoid muscle, target muscle object is extracted using the location information of fascia according to the number of objects in the fascia. When only one object is to be extracted, we search downward first to extract the target muscle area and then search from right to left to extract the area and merge them. If there are two target objects, we extract first from the upper-bound of higher object to the lower-bound of lower object and then remove the fascia of the target object area. Smearing technique is used to restore possible loss of the fat area in the process. The thickness of sternocleidomastoid muscle is then calculated as the maximum thickness of those extracted objects. In this experiment with 30 real world ultrasonography images, the proposed method verified its efficacy and accuracy by health professionals.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07c
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• pp.2645-2648
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• 2003

In this paper, real-time and reconfiguable hardware filter for face recognition is proposed and implemented on FPGA chip using verilog-HDL. In general, face recognition is considerably difficult because it is influenced by noises or the variation of illumination. Some of the commonly used filters such s histogram equalization filter, contrast stretching filter for image enhancement and illumination compensation filter are proposed for realizing more effective illumination compensation. The filter proposed in this paper was designed and verified by debugging and simulating on hardware. Experimental results show that the proposed filter system can generate selective set of real-time reconfiguable hardware filters suitable for face recognition in various situation.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1230-1232
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• 2003

This study aims to extract maximum geological information using the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection radiometer) images of a part of south India. The area chosen for this study is characterized by rock types such as Migmatite, Magnetite Quartzite, Charnockite, Granite, dykes, Granitoid gneiss and Ultramafic rocks, and minerals such as Bauxite, Magnesite, Iron ores, Calcite etc. Advantage was taken of the characteristic reflectance and absorption phenomenon in the VNIR, SWIR and TIR bands for these rocks and minerals, and they were mapped in detail. Image processing methods such as contrast stretching, PC analysis, band ratios and fusion were used in this study. The results of the processing matched with the field details and showed additional details, thus demonstrating the usefulness of ASTER (especially the SWIR bands) data for better geological mapping.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.57-65
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• 2009

This paper presents the image contrast enhancement technique suitable for local dimming backlight of small-sized mobile display while achieving the reduction of the power consumption. In addition to the large-sized TFT-LCD, small-sized one has adopted LED for backlight. Since, conventionally, LED was mounted on the side edge of a display panel, global dimming method has been widely used. However, recently, new advanced method of local dimming by placing the LED to the backside of the display panel and it raised the necessity of sub-blocked processing after partitioning the target image. When the sub-blocked image has low brightness, the supply current of a backlight LED is reduced, which gives both enhancement of contrast ratio and power consumption reduction. In this paper, we propose simple and improved image enhancement algorithm suitable for the small-sized mobile display. After partitioning the input image by equal sized blocks and analyzing the pixel information in each block, we realize the primary contrast enhancement by independently processing the sub-blocks using the information such as histogram, mean, and standard deviation values of luminance(Y) component. And then resulting information is transferred to each backlight control unit for local dimming to realize the secondary contrast enhancement as well as reduction of power consumption.