• Journal of Life Science
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• v.24 no.10
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• pp.1125-1131
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between quadriceps composition and its functional contractility in obese and nonobese elderly individuals. Thirty-four ($70{\pm}2yr$) individuals (obese, n=21; nonobese, n=13) participated in the study. The thigh composition was assessed with a CT scan, and its functional contractility was measured with an isotonic dynamometer. Variables were analyzed with a $2{\times}2$ two-way ANOVA and a contrast test (p<0.05). There were no between-group differences in the subjects' ages and heights, but individuals in the obese group were approximately 23% heavier and had 18% more fat than those in the nonobese group, regardless of gender. The total thigh volume of the obese elderly was greater (~29%) than that of the nonobese elderly, regardless of gender, and the fat volume (~39%) of the obese elderly was greater than that of the nonobese elderly, regardless of gender (p<0.05). Interestingly, the obese elderly tended to have a greater thigh muscle volume (~17% for males [p<0.05] and ~10% for females) than the nonobese. Despite the greater muscle volume, the peak knee extensor torque of the two groups was comparable or slightly greater in the obese individuals. However, when this was normalized by the total thigh volume, the nonobese males showed significantly greater peak torque (~26% for right and ~20% for left; p<0.05) compared to the obese males. The nonobese females also showed greater peak torque (~8% for both legs) than the obese females after normalization, but the result was not statistically significant. In conclusion, although the obese elderly individuals had greater quadriceps muscle mass than the nonobese, the normalized peak torque of the obese was significantly lower than that of the nonobese, implying a lower degree of muscle contractility.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.227-234
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• 2010

The vertical response spectra using the observed ground motions from the recent more than 30 macro earthquakes were analysed and then were compared both to the seismic design response spectra (Reg Guide 1.60), applied to the domestic nuclear power plants, and to the Korean Standard Design Response Spectrum for general structures and buildings (1997). 176 vertical ground motions, without considering soil types, were used for normalization with respect to the peak acceleration value of each ground motion. The results showed that response spectrum had strong dependency on epicentral distance. The results also showed that the vertical response spectra revealed much higher values for frequency bands above 5~7 Hz than Reg. Guide (1.60). The results were also compared to the Korean Standard Response Spectrum for the 3 different soil types and showed that the vertical response spectra revealed much higher values for the frequency bands below 0.2 second (5 Hz) than the Korean Standard Response Spectrum (SD soil condition). These frequency-dependent spectral values could be related to the characteristics of the domestic crustal attenuation and the effect of each site amplification. However, through the qualitative improvements and quantitative enhancement of the observed ground motions, the conservation of vertical seismic design response spectrum should be considered more significantly for the frequency bands above 5 Hz.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.450-456
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• 2016

STDR (sequence time domain reflectometry) to detect a cable fault using a pseudo noise sequence as a reference signal, and time correlation analysis between the reference signal and reflection signal is robust to noisy environments and can detect intermittent faults including open faults and short circuits. On the other hand, if the distance of the fault location is far away or the fault type is a soft fault, attenuation of the reflected signal becomes larger; hence the correlation coefficient in the STDR becomes smaller, which makes fault detection difficult and the measurement error larger. In addition, automation of the fault location by detection of phase and peak value becomes difficult. Therefore, to improve the cable fault detection of a conventional STDR, this paper proposes the algorithm in that the peak value of the correlation coefficient of the reference signal is detected, and a peak value of the correlation coefficient of the reflected signal is then detected after removing the reference signal. The performance of the proposed method was validated experimentally in low-voltage power cables. The performance evaluation showed that the proposed method can identify whether a fault occurred more accurately and can track the fault locations better than conventional STDR despite the signal attenuation. In addition, there was no error of an automatic fault type and its location by the detection of the phase and peak value through the elimination of the reference signal and normalization of the correlation coefficient.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.180-186
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• 2004

The presence of noise in speech signals degrades the performance of recognition systems in which there are mismatches between the training and test environments. To make a speech recognizer robust, it is necessary to compensate these mismatches. In this paper, we studied about an improvement of stochastic feature extraction based on band-SNR for robust speech recognition. At first, we proposed a modified version of the multi-band spectral subtraction (MSS) method which adjusts the subtraction level of noise spectrum according to band-SNR. In the proposed method referred as M-MSS, a noise normalization factor was newly introduced to finely control the over-estimation factor depending on the band-SNR. Also, we modified the architecture of the stochastic feature extraction (SFE) method. We could get a better performance when the spectral subtraction was applied in the power spectrum domain than in the mel-scale domain. This method is denoted as M-SFE. Last, we applied the M-MSS method to the modified stochastic feature extraction structure, which is denoted as the MMSS-MSFE method. The proposed methods were evaluated on isolated word recognition under various noise environments. The average error rates of the M-MSS, M-SFE, and MMSS-MSFE methods over the ordinary spectral subtraction (SS) method were reduced by 18.6%, 15.1%, and 33.9%, respectively. From these results, we can conclude that the proposed methods provide good candidates for robust feature extraction in the noisy speech recognition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.120-130
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• 2020

This paper solves the problem in underdetermined convolutive mixture by improving the disadvantages of the multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization technique widely used in blind source separation. In conventional researches based on Spatial Covariance Matrix (SCM), each element composed of values such as power gain of single channel and correlation tends to degrade the quality of the separated sources due to high variance. In this paper, level and frequency normalization is performed to effectively cluster the estimated sources. Therefore, we propose a novel SCM and an effective distance function for cluster pairs. In this paper, the proposed SCM is used for the initialization of the spatial model and used for hierarchical agglomerative clustering in the bottom-up approach. The proposed algorithm was experimented using the 'Signal Separation Evaluation Campaign 2008 development dataset'. As a result, the improvement in most of the performance indicators was confirmed by utilizing the 'Blind Source Separation Eval toolbox', an objective source separation quality verification tool, and especially the performance superiority of the typical SDR of 1 dB to 3.5 dB was verified.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.274-281
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• 2011

We analysed ground motions form Mw 4.3 earthquake around Backryoung Island for the seismic source focal mechanism and horizontal response spectrum. Focal mechanism of the Backryoung Islands area was compared to existing principal stress orientation of the Korean Peninsula and horizontal response spectrum was also compared to those of the US NRC Regulatory Guide (1.60) and the Korean National Building Code. The ground motions of 3 stations, including vertical, radial, and tangential components for each station, were used for grid search method of moment tensor seismic source. The principal stress orientation from this study, ENE-WSW, is consistent fairly well with that of the Korean Peninsula. The horizontal response spectrum using 30 observed ground motions analysed and then were compared to both the seismic design response spectra (Reg Guide 1.60), applied to the domestic nuclear power plants, and the Korean Standard Design Response Spectrum for general structures and buildings (1997). Response spectrum of 30 horizontal ground motions were used for normalization with respect to the peak acceleration value of each ground motion. The results showed that the horizontal response spectrum revealed higher values for frequency bands above 3 Hz than Reg. Guide (1.60). The results were also compared to the Korean Standard Response Spectrum for the 3 different soil types and showed that the vertical response spectra revealed higher values for the frequency bands below 0.8 second than the Korean Standard Response Spectrum (SD soil condition). However, through the qualitative improvements and quantitative enhancement of the observed ground motions, the conservation of horizontal seismic design response spectrum should be considered more significantly for the higher frequency bands.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.49-56
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• 2018

Euclidean distance (ED) between error distribution and Dirac delta function has been used as an efficient performance criterion in impulsive noise environmentsdue to the outlier-cutting effect of Gaussian kernel for error signal. The gradient of ED for its minimization has two components; $A_k$ for kernel function of error pairs and the other $B_k$ for kernel function of errors. In this paper, it is analyzed that the first component is to govern gathering close together error samples, and the other one $B_k$ is to conduct error-sample concentration on zero. Based upon this analysis, it is proposed to normalize $A_k$ and $B_k$ with power of inputs which are modified by kernelled error pairs or errors for the purpose of reinforcing their roles of narrowing error-gap and drawing error samples to zero. Through comparison of fluctuation of steady state MSE and value of minimum MSE in the results of simulation of multipath equalization under impulsive noise, their roles and efficiency of the proposed normalization method are verified.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.10C
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• pp.1017-1026
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• 2005

In burst OFDM system, the frame synchronization should be performed first for the acquisition of received frame and the estimation of the correct FFT-window position. The conventional frame synchronization algorithms using design features of the preamble symbol, the repetition pattern of the OFDM symbol by pilot sub-carrier allocation rule and Cyclic Prefix(CP), has difficulty in the detection of precise frame timing because its correlation characteristics would increase and decrease gradually. Also, the algorithm based on the correlation between the reference signal and the received signal has performance degradation due to frequency offset. Therefore, we adopt a differential correlation method that is robust to frequency offset and has the clear peak value at the correct frame timing for frame synchronization. However, performance improvement is essential for differential correlation methods, since it usually shows multiple peak values due to the repetition pattern. In this paper, we propose an enhanced frame synchronization algorithm based on the differential correlation method that shows a clear single peak value by using differential correlation between samples of identical repeating pattern. We also introduce a normalization scheme which normalizes the result of differential correlation with signal power to reduce the frame timing error in the high speed mobile channel environments.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.399-407
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• 2010

The horizontal response spectra using the observed ground motions from the recent more than 19 macro earthquakes were analysed and then were compared to both the seismic design response spectra (Reg Guide 1.60), applied to the domestic nuclear power plants, and the Korean Standard Design Response Spectrum for general structures and buildings (1997). 130 horizontal ground motions, without considering soil types, were used for normalization with respect to the peak acceleration value of each ground motion. The results showed that response spectrum have strong dependency on epicentral distance. The results also showed that the horizontal response spectra revealed much higher values for frequency bands above 5 Hz than Reg. Guide (1.60). The results were also compared to the Korean Standard Response Spectrum for the 3 different soil types and showed that the vertical response spectra revealed much higher values for the frequency bands below 0.3 second than the Korean Standard Response Spectrum (SD soil condition). These spectral values dependent on frequency could be related to characteristics of the domestic crustal attenuation and the effect of each site amplification. However, through the qualitative improvements and quantitative enhancement of the observed ground motions, the conservation of horizontal seismic design response spectrum should be considered more significantly for the frequency bands above 5 Hz.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.105-112
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• 2018

South Korea and Vietnam have been engaged in extensive political, economic and cultural exchanges since the establishment of diplomaticties in 1992. In March 2018, Moon Jae-in, President of South Korea, made an official visit to Vietnam, a key partner of the New Southern Policy and discussed comprehensive cooperation measures, including expanding trade volume and measures to establish peace on the Korean Peninsula. At the defense ministers' meeting held in April 2018, the two countries signed a joint defense and defense cooperation statement, which included promotion of maritime security, defense cooperation, UN PKO activities, excavation of remains, and joint military cooperation. Currently, Vietnam is facing territorial disputes with China over the South China Sea, and is stepping up military modernization and military buildup to counter this. In particular, Vietnam is strengthening its external military cooperation beyond ideology with the U.S., Russia, India and France to strengthen its maritime power. Against this backdrop, the bilateral cooperation between South Korea and Vietnam needs to expand beyond the traditional economic and cultural exchanges to military cooperation. The study aims to review the relationship between South Korea and Vietnam on the 26th anniversary of the normalization of diplomaticties and seek ways to develop military cooperation with Vietnam, which has grown to the next China. To that end, it analyzed Vietnam's security environment and military strategy and presented strategies for promoting military cooperation focusing on defense areas.