• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.817-824
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• 2007

Tractography using Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI) is a method to determine the architecture of axonal fibers in the central nervous system by computing the direction of the principal eigenvector in the white matter of the brain. However, the fiber tracking methods suffer from the noise included in the diffusion tensor images that affects the determination of the principal eigenvector. As the fiber tracking progresses, the accumulated error creates a large deviation between the calculated fiber and the real fiber. This problem of the DT-MRI tractography is known mathematically as the ill-posed problem which means that tractography is very sensitive to perturbations by noise. To reduce the noise in DT-MRI measurements, a tensor-valued median filter which is reported to be denoising and structure-preserving in fiber tracking, is applied in the tractography. In this paper, we proposed the modified gradient descent method which converges fast and accurately to the optimal tensor-valued median filter by changing the step size. In addition, the performance of the modified gradient descent method is compared with others. We used the synthetic image which consists of 45 degree principal eigenvectors and the corticospinal tract. For the synthetic image, the proposed method achieved 4.66%, 16.66% and 15.08% less error than the conventional gradient descent method for error measures AE, AAE, AFA respectively. For the corticospinal tract, at iteration number ten the proposed method achieved 3.78%, 25.71 % and 11.54% less error than the conventional gradient descent method for error measures AE, AAE, AFA respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.117-128
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• 2016

Installation of earth grounding system is essential to ensure personnel safety and correct operation of electrical equipment. Earth parameters, especially, soil resistivity has to be determined in designing an efficient earth grounding system. The most common applied technique to measure soil resistance is Wenner four-point method. Implementation of this method is expensive, time consuming and cumbersome as large set of measurements with variable electrode spacing are required to obtain a one dimensional resistivity plot. It is advantageous to have a method which is of low cost and provides fast measurements. In this perspective, electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is applied to estimate subsurface resistivity profile. Electrical resistance tomograms characterize the soil resistivity distribution based on the measurements from electrodes placed in the region of interest. The nonlinear ill-posed inverse problem is solved using iterated Gauss-Newton method with Tikhonov regularization. Through extensive numerical simulations, it is found that ERT offers promising performance in estimating the three-dimensional soil resistivity distribution.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2023

In this paper, we present a method for estimating full 3D shapes from given 2D silhouette images of human bodies. Because the silhouette only consists of the partial information on the true shape, it is an ill-posed problem. To address the problem, we use the statistical human shape space obtained from the existing large 3D human shape database. The method consists of three steps. First, we extract the boundary pixels and their appropriate normal vectors from the input silhouette images. Then, we initialize the correspondences of each pixel to the vertex of the statistically-deformable 3D human model. Finally, we numerically optimize the parameters of the statistical model to fit best to the given silhouettes. The viability and the robustness of the method is demonstrated with various experiments.

• Toxicological Research
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.159-166
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• 1990

The ability of many toxigenic fungi to invade and develop in a wide variety of raw ingredients of human diet renders human exposure to mycotoxing very difficult to avoid. Most of the energy-rich commodities, such as cereal grains, oil seeds, tree nuts, and dehydrated fruits, are susceptible to mycotoxin contamination. Mycotoxins therefare have been recognized as an important class of hazardous substances in the human food chain. Although human exposure to mycotoxins is largely through ingestion, inhalation and skin contact may also be significant under conditions other than consumption of foods. Human ingestion of mycotoxins is due to consumption of contaminated dietary ingredients and the edible tissues and products of domestic animals that have been exposed to mycotoxins in moldy feed. Large scale acute human mycotoxicoses, such as ergotism in France, alimentary toxic aleukia in Russia, yellow rice syndrome in Japan, endemic nephropathy in Balkan countries, and acute aflatoxin poisonings in India and Taiwan, have been well documented, indicating that mycotoxicosis is a global problem. In some incidents, hundreds of victims were killed and many more became seriously ill. The mycotoxins that have been implicated in the etiology of these human diseases include aflatoxins, citreoviridin, cyclopiazonic acid, ergot alkaloids, moniliformin, ochratoxin A, trichothecenes, tenuazonic acid, and zearalenone. Among these, aflatoxins have been also implicated in the etiology of human primary liver cancer in those high-incidence countries in Africa and southeast Asia. It is well recognized that cause-effect relationship between mycotoxins and human diseases is very difficult to establish, especially for the cancer connection. Careful risk assessment must be performed to determine whether a mycotoxin indeed warrants costly regulatory actions.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1658-1667
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• 2008

Reconstruction of 3D objects from a single view image is generally an ill-posed problem because of the projection distortion. A monocular vision based 3D object localization method is proposed in this paper, which approximates an object on the ground to a simple bounding solid and works automatically without any prior information about the object. A spherical or cylindrical object determined based on a circularity measure is approximated to a bounding cylinder, while the other general free-shaped objects to a bounding box or a bounding cylinder appropriately. For a general object, its silhouette on the ground is first computed by back-projecting its projected image in image plane onto the ground plane and then a base rectangle on the ground is determined by using the intuition that touched parts of the object on the ground should appear at lower part of the silhouette. The base rectangle is adjusted and extended until a derived bounding box from it can enclose the general object sufficiently. Height of the bounding box is also determined enough to enclose the general object. When the general object looks like a round-shaped object, a bounding cylinder that encloses the bounding box minimally is selected instead of the bounding box. A bounding solid can be utilized to localize a 3D object on the ground and to roughly estimate its volume. Usefulness of our approach is presented with experimental results on real image objects and limitations of our approach are discussed.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.4420-4438
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• 2021

Image dehazing is an ill-posed problem which is far from being solved. Traditional image dehazing methods often yield mediocre effects and possess substandard processing speed, while modern deep learning methods perform best only in certain datasets. The haze removal effect when processed by said methods is unsatisfactory, meaning the generalization performance fails to meet the requirements. Concurrently, due to the limited processing speed, most dehazing algorithms cannot be employed in the industry. To alleviate said problems, a lightweight fast dehazing network based on a multiple scale-patch framework (MSP) is proposed in the present paper. Firstly, the multi-scale structure is employed as the backbone network and the multi-patch structure as the supplementary network. Dehazing through a single network causes problems, such as loss of object details and color in some image areas, the multi-patch structure was employed for MSP as an information supplement. In the algorithm image processing module, the image is segmented up and down for processed separately. Secondly, MSP generates a clear dehazing effect and significant robustness when targeting real-world homogeneous and nonhomogeneous hazy maps and different datasets. Compared with existing dehazing methods, MSP demonstrated a fast inference speed and the feasibility of real-time processing. The overall size and model parameters of the entire dehazing model are 20.75M and 6.8M, and the processing time for the single image is 0.026s. Experiments on NTIRE 2018 and NTIRE 2020 demonstrate that MSP can achieve superior performance among the state-of-the-art methods, such as PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and individual subjective evaluation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2021.06a
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• pp.303-306
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• 2021

이미지 초해상도는 영상 취득 과정에서 센서와 렌즈의 물리적인 한계 등으로 인하여 의해 화질이 저하된 이미지를 더 높은 배율로 복원하는 문제이다. 이미지 초해상도는 딥러닝을 통해 놀라운 성능향상을 이루었지만, 카메라로 촬영된 실제 이미지에서는 좋은 성능을 내지 못하였다. 이는 딥러닝에서는 'bicubic' 커널로 down-sampling된 합성 이미지 데이터를 사용하였던 것과 달리 실제 이미지에서는 'bicubic' 커널을 통한 화질 저하와는 다른 화질 저하, 즉 다른 커널을 통한 화질 저하가 발생하기 때문이다. 따라서 실제 이미지에 대한 성능을 높이기 위해서는 이에 대한 정확한 커널 예측이 필요하다. 최근 주목받기 시작한 이미지 초해상도를 위한 커널 예측은 초해상도를 잘 시켜주는 커널을 직접 찾는 방법[10, 13]과 이미지의 분포와 커널을 통해 다운샘플된 이미지에 대한 분포를 일치시켜주면서 커널을 예측하는 방법[14]으로 나누어져 있다. 그러나 두 방법 모두 ill-posed problem 인 커널 예측 문제를 한 장의 이미지만으로 해결하려는 것이기 때문에 정확한 예측에는 어려움이 발생한다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 두 장의 이미지를 활용한 이미지 화질 저하 커널 예측 방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 두 장의 이미지가 같은 카메라를 통해 촬영되었으며 이때 이미지 화질 저하는 카메라에 의해서만 영향을 받는다는 가정을 기반으로 한다. 즉, 두 장의 이미지는 같은 커널을 통해 저하된 이미지라는 가정을 한다. 제안된 방법은 [14]에서처럼 이미지 분포를 기반으로 한 커널 예측을 진행하며, 이미지 초해상도를 진행하고자 하는 이미지 외에 참고 이미지 또한 같은 커널에서 화질 저하를 시켰을 때 본래의 이미지와 같은 분포에 있도록 학습을 진행한다. 결과적으로 본 논문에서는 두 장의 이미지를 사용하였을 때 더욱 정확하게 커널을 찾을 수 있음을 보여준다. 두 장의 이미지를 활용하는 방식이 한 장의 이미지만을 활용하는 기존의 최고 수준의 방법에 비해 합성된 다양한 커널 데이터셋[14]에서 약 0.17dB 성능 향상이 있었다.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.7-17
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• 2005

The determination of seismic velocities in refractors for near-surface seismic refraction investigations is an ill-posed problem. Small variations in the computed time parameters can result in quite large lateral variations in the derived velocities, which are often artefacts of the inversion algorithms. Such artefacts are usually not recognized or corrected with forward modelling. Therefore, if detailed refractor models are sought with model based inversion, then detailed starting models are required. The usual source of artefacts in seismic velocities is irregular refractors. Under most circumstances, the variable migration of the generalized reciprocal method (GRM) is able to accommodate irregular interfaces and generate detailed starting models of the refractor. However, where the very-near-surface environment of the Earth is also irregular, the efficacy of the GRM is reduced, and weathering corrections can be necessary. Standard methods for correcting for surface irregularities are usually not practical where the very-near-surface irregularities are of limited lateral extent. In such circumstances, the GRM smoothing statics method (SSM) is a simple and robust approach, which can facilitate more-accurate estimates of refractor velocities. The GRM SSM generates a smoothing 'statics' correction by subtracting an average of the time-depths computed with a range of XY values from the time-depths computed with a zero XY value (where the XY value is the separation between the receivers used to compute the time-depth). The time-depths to the deeper target refractors do not vary greatly with varying XY values, and therefore an average is much the same as the optimum value. However, the time-depths for the very-near-surface irregularities migrate laterally with increasing XY values and they are substantially reduced with the averaging process. As a result, the time-depth profile averaged over a range of XY values is effectively corrected for the near-surface irregularities. In addition, the time-depths computed with a Bero XY value are the sum of both the near-surface effects and the time-depths to the target refractor. Therefore, their subtraction generates an approximate 'statics' correction, which in turn, is subtracted from the traveltimes The GRM SSM is essentially a smoothing procedure, rather than a deterministic weathering correction approach, and it is most effective with near-surface irregularities of quite limited lateral extent. Model and case studies demonstrate that the GRM SSM substantially improves the reliability in determining detailed seismic velocities in irregular refractors.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.17-25
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• 1999

A traveltime tomography has been carried out by transforming electromagnetic data in frequency domain to wave-like domain. The transform uniquely relates a field satisfying a diffusion equation to an integral of the corresponding wavefield. But direct transform of frequency domain magnetic fields to wave-field domain is ill-posed problem because the kernel of the integral transform is highly damped. In this study, instead of solving such an unstable problem, it is assumed that wave-fields in transformed domain can be approximated by sum of ray series. And for further simplicity, reflection and refraction energy compared to that of direct wave is weak enough to be neglected. Then first arrival can be approximated by calculating the traveltime of direct wave only. But these assumptions are valid when the conductivity contrast between background medium and the target anomalous body is low enough. So this approach can only be applied to the models with low conductivity contrast. To verify the algorithm, traveltime calculated by this approach was compared to that of direct transform method and exact traveltime, calculated analytically, for homogeneous whole space. The error in first arrival picked by this study was less than that of direct transformation method, especially when the number of frequency samples is less than 10, or when the data are noisy. Layered earth model with varying conductivity contrasts and inclined dyke model have been successfully imaged by applying nonlinear traveltime tomography in 30 iterations within three CPU minutes on a IBM Pentium Pro 200 MHz.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.207-212
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• 2004

This article reviews recent developments in three-dimensional (3-D) magntotelluric (MT) imaging. The inversion of MT data is fundamentally ill-posed, and therefore the resultant solution is non-unique. A regularizing scheme must be involved to reduce the non-uniqueness while retaining certain a priori information in the solution. The standard approach to nonlinear inversion in geophysis has been the Gauss-Newton method, which solves a sequence of linearized inverse problems. When running to convergence, the algorithm minimizes an objective function over the space of models and in the sense produces an optimal solution of the inverse problem. The general usefulness of iterative, linearized inversion algorithms, however is greatly limited in 3-D MT applications by the requirement of computing the Jacobian(partial derivative, sensitivity) matrix of the forward problem. The difficulty may be relaxed using conjugate gradients(CG) methods. A linear CG technique is used to solve each step of Gauss-Newton iterations incompletely, while the method of nonlinear CG is applied directly to the minimization of the objective function. These CG techniques replace computation of jacobian matrix and solution of a large linear system with computations equivalent to only three forward problems per inversion iteration. Consequently, the algorithms are efficient in computational speed and memory requirement, making 3-D inversion feasible.