• Korean Journal of Environment and Ecology
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.986-995
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• 2016

The objective of this study was to analyze the distribution of endangered fish species and elucidate their relations on chemical water quality, physical habitat conditions and ecological stream health. The dominant species in the watershed was Pseudopungtungia nigra (Pn), Gobiobotia macrocephala (Gm), Gobiobotia brevibarba (Gb), Liobagrus obesus (Lo), and Iksookimia choii (Ic) in the order. The species of Pn designated as "critical endangered species (I) (CER)", was most widely distributed species among the endangered species, so the designation of the species should be re-evaluated. The endangered species was most popular (4 species, 384 individuals) in the Cho-River region of eighteen lotic regions. According to the analysis of chemical tolerance limits in the habitats with endangered fish species, biological oxygen demand (BOD) and total phosphorus (TP) was analyzed as "very good" (Ia) and "good condition" in the chemical criteria of the Ministry of Environment, Korea. Also, chemical conditions, based on ammonia-N ($NH_{4+}$), total nitrogen (TN), phosphate-P ($PO_{4^-}P$) were much better in the habitat with endangered species (Hw) than the habitat without endangered species (Ho). In the meantime, the species of Ic showed wide ranges on the chemical tolerance, so physical habitat conditions, such as the size of substrate particles (sand) and hydrological regime, were considered as more important factors than the chemical water quality, if the water quality is not largely degraded. The endangered species were also more distributed in the high-order (4-6) streams than the low-order (1-3) streams. The evaluation of ecological stream health, based on multi-metric model of the Index of Biological Integrity (IBI), showed the large difference between the Hw (21.6, fair condition)and Ho (30.5, good condition), indicating that the habitat maintained well chemically and physically had higher distributions of endangered species. Overall, the designation of CER on the Pn should be re-evaluated due to wide-distributions, and the protections from water pollution and the habitat conservations on the endangered species are necessary in the watershed.

• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.77-88
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• 2008

There has been growing demands to manage the water quality of west coastal region due to the large scale urbanization along the coastal zone, the possibility of application of TMDL(Total Maximum Daily Loadings) to Han river, and the natural disaster such as oil spill incident in Taean, Chungnam. However, no system has been developed for such purposes. In this background, the demand of GIS based effective water quality management has been increased to monitor water quality environment and propose best management alternatives for Han river and Kyeonggi bay. This study mainly focused on the development of integrated water quality management system for Han river bas in and its estuary are a connected to Kyeonggi bay to support integrated water quality management and its plan. Integration was made based on GIS by spatial linking between water quality attributes and location information. A GIS DB was built to estimate the amount of generated and discharged water pollutants according to TMDL technical guide and it included input data to use two different water quality models--W ASP7 for Han river and EFDC for coastal area--to forecast water quality and to suggest BMP(Best management Practices). The results of BOD, TN, and TP from WASP7 were used as the input to run EFDC. Based on the study results, some critical areas which have relatively higher pollutant loadings were identified, and it was also identified that the locations discharging water pollutant loadings to river and seasonal factor affected water quality. And the relationship of water quality between river and its estuary area was quantitatively verified. The results showed that GIS based integrated system could be used as a tool for estimating status-quo of water quality and proposing economically effective BMPs to mitigate water pollution. Further studies need to be made for improving system's capabilities such as adding decision making function as well as cost-benefit analysis, etc. Also, the concrete methodology for water quality management using the system need to be developed.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.31-39
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• 2016

Background: It is necessary to consider the overall countermeasure for analysis of nuclear activities according to the increase of the nuclear facilities like nuclear power and reprocessing plants in the neighboring countries including China, Taiwan, North Korea, Japan and South Korea. South Korea and comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty organization (CTBTO) are now operating the monitoring instruments to detect radionuclides released into the air. It is important to estimate the origin of radionuclides measured using the detection technology as well as the monitoring analysis in aspects of investigation and security of the nuclear activities in neighboring countries. Materials and methods: A three-dimensional forward/backward trajectory model has been developed to estimate the origin of radionuclides for a covert nuclear activity. The developed trajectory model was composed of forward and backward modules to track the particle positions using finite difference method. Results and discussion: A three-dimensional trajectory model was validated using the measured data at Chernobyl accident. The calculated results showed a good agreement by using the high concentration measurements and the locations where was near a release point. The three-dimensional trajectory model had some uncertainty according to the release time, release height and time interval of the trajectory at each release points. An atmospheric dispersion model called long-range accident dose assessment system (LADAS), based on the fields of regards (FOR) technique, was applied to reduce the uncertainties of the trajectory model and to improve the detective technology for estimating the radioisotopes emission area. Conclusion: The detective technology developed in this study can evaluate in release area and origin for covert nuclear activities based on measured radioisotopes at monitoring stations, and it might play critical tool to improve the ability of the nuclear safety field.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.31 no.11
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• pp.947-956
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• 2009

Residual petroleum hydrocarbons after an oil spill may accumulate in the marine benthic ecosystem due to their high hydrophobicity. A lot of monitoring data are required for the estimation of ecosystem exposure to residual petrochemicals in an ecological risk assessment in the affected region. To save time and cost, the environmental exposure to them in the affected ecosystem can also be assessed using a simple food-web bioaccumulation model. In this study, we evaluated residual concentrations of four selected polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (phenanthrene, anthracene, pyrene, and benzo[a]pyrene) in a hypothetic benthic ecosystem composed of six species under two exposure scenarios. Body-residue concentration ranged 5~250 mg/kg body depending on trophic positions in an extreme scenario in which the aqueous concentrations of PAHs were assumed to be one-tenth of their aqueous solubility. In addition, bioconcentration factors (BCFs) and bioaccumulation factors (BAFs) were evaluated for model species. The logarithm of bioconcentration factor (log BCF) linearly increased with increasing the logarithm of 1-octanol-water partition coefficient (log $K_{OW}$) until log $K_{OW}$ of 7.0, followed by a gradual decrease with further increase in log $K_{OW}$ without metabolic degradation. Biomagnification became significant when log $K_{OW}$ of a pollutant exceeded 5.0 in the model ecosystem, indicating that investigation of food-web structure should be critical to predict biomagnifications in the affected ecosystem because log $K_{OW}$ values of many petrochemicals are higher than 5.0. Although further research is required for better site-specific evaluation of exposure, the model simulation can be used to estimate the level of the ecosystem exposure to residual oil contaminants at the screening level.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.144-159
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• 2014

Techniques for making a single panoramic image using multiple pictures are widely studied in many areas such as computer vision, computer graphics, etc. The panorama image can be applied to various fields like virtual reality, robot vision areas which require wide-angled shots as an useful way to overcome the limitations such as picture-angle, resolutions, and internal informations of an image taken from a single camera. It is so much meaningful in a point that a panoramic image usually provides better immersion feeling than a plain image. Although there are many ways to build a panoramic image, most of them are using the way of extracting feature points and matching points of each images for making a single panoramic image. In addition, those methods use the RANSAC(RANdom SAmple Consensus) algorithm with matching points and the Homography matrix to transform the image. The SURF(Speeded Up Robust Features) algorithm which is used in this paper to extract featuring points uses an image's black and white informations and local spatial informations. The SURF is widely being used since it is very much robust at detecting image's size, view-point changes, and additionally, faster than the SIFT(Scale Invariant Features Transform) algorithm. The SURF has a shortcoming of making an error which results in decreasing the RANSAC algorithm's performance speed when extracting image's feature points. As a result, this may increase the CPU usage occupation rate. The error of detecting matching points may role as a critical reason for disqualifying panoramic image's accuracy and lucidity. In this paper, in order to minimize errors of extracting matching points, we used $3{\times}3$ region's RGB pixel values around the matching points' coordinates to perform intermediate filtering process for removing wrong matching points. We have also presented analysis and evaluation results relating to enhanced working speed for producing a panorama image, CPU usage rate, extracted matching points' decreasing rate and accuracy.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.388-401
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• 2011

Asian dust was observed a total of 66 times in the springtime during the period from 2002 to 2010, with 26 cases in March, 23 cases in April and 17 cases in May. This study investigates a Asian dust episode that occurred during the period from 22 to 25 May 2010, based on synoptic weather patterns, wind vector at 850 hPa, relative humidity at 1000 hPa, Jet streams and wind vector at 300 hPa, PM10 concentration in Korea and satellite imagery. In this case, Asian dust originated on 22 May along the rear of a developing low pressure system in Mongolia. The Asian dust was then transported southeastward and bypassed the Korea peninsula from 23 to 24 May, before reaching Japan on 25 May. Jet streams on 24 May bypassed the Korean peninsula and induced the development of a surface low pressure centered over the peninsula. The resulting air flow was critical to the trajectory of the Asian dust, which likewise bypassed the Korean peninsula. 72-hour backward trajectory data reveal that the Shandong Peninsula and the East China Sea were the points of origin for the air flows that swept through the Japanese sites where Asian dust was observable to the naked eay. The Asian dust pathway is ascertained by horizontal distribution of the Asian dust of RGB imagery from MODIS satellites which captured the Asian dust moving over the Shandong Peninsula, the East China Sea, and northwest of the Kyushu region in Japan. Since the synoptic pattern and the transport way of the Asian dust case are far from typical ones, which Asian dust forecasting technique has long been based on, this study can be good example of exceptional Asian dust pattern and it will be used for more accurate Asian dust forecasting.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.265-272
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• 2004

Background : RASSF1A, which is one of tumor suppressor genes, is frequently inactivated by hypermethylation of the promoter region in a variety of human cancers, including lung cancer. This study was performed to investigate the association between RASSF1A methylation and the clinicopathological factors in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. Methods : Eighty-one samples from the patients with squamous cell carcinoma of lung were examined. The promoter methyation of RASSF1A was analyzed by methylation specific PCR and sequencing. Statistical analysis was made to examine the association between RASSF1A methylation and the clinicopathological parameters. Results : RASSF1A methylation was observed in 37.0 % (30 of 81) of the patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. RASSF1A methylation was found to be associated with cellular differentiation(p=0.0097) and the overall survival(p=0.0635). However, there was no association between RASSF1A methylation and the other clinicopathological parameters, such as the pathological TNM stage, the recurrence rate, lymph node invasion and the amount of cigarettes smoked. Conclusion : RASSF1A methylation might be associated with a poor prognosis in patients with squamous carcinoma of the lung. A larger scale study is needed.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.4
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• pp.311-320
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• 2007

This paper presents vision-based 3D facial expression animation technique and system which provide the robust 3D head pose estimation and real-time facial expression control. Many researches of 3D face animation have been done for the facial expression control itself rather than focusing on 3D head motion tracking. However, the head motion tracking is one of critical issues to be solved for developing realistic facial animation. In this research, we developed an integrated animation system that includes 3D head motion tracking and facial expression control at the same time. The proposed system consists of three major phases: face detection, 3D head motion tracking, and facial expression control. For face detection, with the non-parametric HT skin color model and template matching, we can detect the facial region efficiently from video frame. For 3D head motion tracking, we exploit the cylindrical head model that is projected to the initial head motion template. Given an initial reference template of the face image and the corresponding head motion, the cylindrical head model is created and the foil head motion is traced based on the optical flow method. For the facial expression cloning we utilize the feature-based method, The major facial feature points are detected by the geometry of information of the face with template matching and traced by optical flow. Since the locations of varying feature points are composed of head motion and facial expression information, the animation parameters which describe the variation of the facial features are acquired from geometrically transformed frontal head pose image. Finally, the facial expression cloning is done by two fitting process. The control points of the 3D model are varied applying the animation parameters to the face model, and the non-feature points around the control points are changed by use of Radial Basis Function(RBF). From the experiment, we can prove that the developed vision-based animation system can create realistic facial animation with robust head pose estimation and facial variation from input video image.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.44-51
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• 2014

BACKGROUND: Water quality of rural areas are susceptible to agricultural nutrient input and supply such as chemical fertilizer and livestock manure. This study was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of nutrient (N and P) indices in understanding spatial variations of water quality across Chonnam province which is a typical agricultural region in Korea. METHODS AND RESULTS: The nutrient indices including chemical fertilizer supply, livestock manure production, and nutrient balance were correlated with water quality data (T-N, T-P, BOD, and COD) for the twenty-two districts of the province. Concentration of T-N were positively correlated with chemical fertilizer supply, livestock manure N production, and nutrient balance (P<0.05 or P<0.01). Meanwhile, T-P concentration was not correlated with these nutrient indices; however, there was a tendency that T-P concentration increases with livestock manure P production (P=0.06) and with nutrient balance (P=0.09). These results suggest that T-N concentration is susceptible to both chemical fertilizer and livestock manure; whereas T-P is likely to be affected by livestock manure rather than chemical fertilizer. The concentrations of BOD and COD were also positively (P<0.05 or P<0.01) correlated with livestock manure production. CONCLUSION: This study shows the usefulness of nutrient indices in understanding spatial variations of water quality and suggests that livestock manure rather than chemical fertilizer can be a more critical water pollution source and thus highlights the need for more attention to livestock manure treatments for rural water quality management.

• Development and Reproduction
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.47-52
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• 2001

Predetermination of sex in livestock of offpring is in great demand and is of critical importance to providing for the most efficient production of the animal ariculture. Such a sexing techlology would also enhance the economy of conventional artificial insemination(AI) and aid the porcine industry. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of enriching X-bearing porcine sperm using discontinuous percoll gradients and PCR mefhod. Semen was collected from mature boars of proven fertility center (AI center KimHae). Sperm was leaded on the isotonic discontinuous percoll gradient and then it was centrifuged at 120 ${\times}$ g for 20 minutes. After centrifugation, sperm included in each fraction were recovered (7${\times}$10$^6$ sperms/ml) and then sperm genomic DNA was extractedfor the PCR. SRY gene was used to evaluate the ratio between X and Y sperm in the separated fractions. Ju viro ffrtilization wascarried out by adding the unseparated sperm (control) or separated (experimental poop) to the matured oocytes in TCM-199. Embryos for sex determination were obtained at 2 cell stage and then was used for SRY gene amplification. After centrifugation of discontinuous percoll gradient, the most motile sperm was obtained at 95% fiaction (94.4% ${\pm}$ 5.1%, p < 0.01). The PCR analysis evaluated that 30%, 50% and 65% fractions were Y sperm rich, whereas 80% and 95% fractions were X sperm rich. PCR analysis with each porcineembryo showed that 33.3% of control and 66.7% of experimental group were determined as female embryos. In conclusion, in vitro matured oocytes inseminated with sperms (95% fraction) prepared by percoll gradient centrifugation showed high fertilization rates and female embryos than control sperms.