• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.31-35
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• 2017

Optical observation is one of the most common techniques used for characterizing the physical properties of unknown objects and debris in space. This research presents measurements and properties of the new object 96019 from ground-based optical methods. Optical observations of this small object were performed using a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and the Santel-500 telescope at the Zvenigorod Observatory. The orbital elements and physical properties of this object, such as area-to-mass ratio, have been determined. The results show that this small object has a low area-to-mass ratio, between 0.009 and $0.12m^2/kg$. The light curve of object 96019 is given: Over the time intervals, variations in brightness are analyzed and the maximum brightness was found to be 12.4 magnitudes. The observational results show that, this object brightens by about three magnitudes over a time span of three minutes. Based on these observations, the characteristics and physical properties of this object are discussed.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.592-601
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• 2013

Object segmentation is a challenging task in image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we present a visual attention based segmentation method to segment small sized interesting objects in natural images. Different from the traditional methods, we first search the region of interest by using our novel saliency-based method, which is mainly based on band-pass filtering, to obtain the appropriate frequency. Secondly, we applied the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to locate the object region. By incorporating the visual attention analysis into object segmentation, our proposed approach is able to narrow the search region for object segmentation, so that the accuracy is increased and the computational complexity is reduced. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approach is efficient for object segmentation in natural images, especially for small objects. Our proposed method significantly outperforms traditional GMM based segmentation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.95-101
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• 2007

Recently, small-animal imaging technology has been rapidly developed for longitudinal screening of laboratory animals such as mice and rats. One of newly developed imaging modalities for small animals is an x-ray micro-CT (computed tomography). We have developed two types of x-ray micro-CT systems for small animal imaging. Both systems use flat-panel x-ray detectors and micro-focus x-ray sources to obtain high spatial resolution of $10{\mu}m$. In spite of the relatively large field-of-view (FOV) of flat-panel detectors, the spatial resolution in the whole-body imaging of rats should be sacrificed down to the order of $100{\mu}m$ due to the limited number of x-ray detector pixels. Though the spatial resolution of cone-beam CTs can be improved by moving an object toward an x-ray source, the FOV should be reduced and the object size is also limited. To overcome the limitation of the object size and resolution, we introduce zoom-in micro-tomography for high-resolution imaging of a local region-of-interest (ROI) inside a large object. For zoom-in imaging, we use two kinds of projection data in combination, one from a full FOV scan of the whole object and the other from a limited FOV scan of the ROI. Both of our micro-CT systems have zoom-in micro-tomography capability. One of both is a micro-CT system with a fixed gantry mounted with an x-ray source and a detector. An imaged object is laid on a rotating table between a source and a detector. The other micro-CT system has a rotating gantry with a fixed object table, which makes whole scans without rotating an object. In this paper, we report the results of in vivo small animal study using the developed micro-CTs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.4795-4815
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• 2020

Drone detection can be considered as a specific sort of small object detection, which has always been a challenge because of its small size and few features. For improving the detection rate of drones, we design a Deeper SSD network, which uses large-scale input image and deeper convolutional network to obtain more features that benefit small object classification. At the same time, in order to improve object classification performance, we implemented the up-sampling modules to increase the number of features for the low-level feature map. In addition, in order to improve object location performance, we adopted the down-sampling modules so that the context information can be used by the high-level feature map directly. Our proposed Deeper SSD and its variants are successfully applied to the self-designed drone datasets. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the Deeper SSD and its variants, which are useful to small drone's detection and recognition. These proposed methods can also detect small and large objects simultaneously.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1243-1244
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• 2022

In recent years, the growing interest in off-site construction has led to factories scaling up their manufacturing and production processes in the construction sector. Consequently, continuous large-scale site monitoring in low-variability environments, such as prefabricated components production plants (precast concrete production), has gained increasing importance. Although many studies on computer vision-based site monitoring have been conducted, challenges for deploying this technology for large-scale field applications still remain. One of the issues is collecting and transmitting vast amounts of video data. Continuous site monitoring systems are based on real-time video data collection and analysis, which requires excessive computational resources and network traffic. In addition, it is difficult to integrate various object information with different sizes and scales into a single scene. Various sizes and types of objects (e.g., workers, heavy equipment, and materials) exist in a plant production environment, and these objects should be detected simultaneously for effective site monitoring. However, with the existing object detection algorithms, it is difficult to simultaneously detect objects with significant differences in size because collecting and training massive amounts of object image data with various scales is necessary. This study thus developed a large-scale site monitoring system using edge computing and a small-object detection system to solve these problems. Edge computing is a distributed information technology architecture wherein the image or video data is processed near the originating source, not on a centralized server or cloud. By inferring information from the AI computing module equipped with CCTVs and communicating only the processed information with the server, it is possible to reduce excessive network traffic. Small-object detection is an innovative method to detect different-sized objects by cropping the raw image and setting the appropriate number of rows and columns for image splitting based on the target object size. This enables the detection of small objects from cropped and magnified images. The detected small objects can then be expressed in the original image. In the inference process, this study used the YOLO-v5 algorithm, known for its fast processing speed and widely used for real-time object detection. This method could effectively detect large and even small objects that were difficult to detect with the existing object detection algorithms. When the large-scale site monitoring system was tested, it performed well in detecting small objects, such as workers in a large-scale view of construction sites, which were inaccurately detected by the existing algorithms. Our next goal is to incorporate various safety monitoring and risk analysis algorithms into this system, such as collision risk estimation, based on the time-to-collision concept, enabling the optimization of safety routes by accumulating workers' paths and inferring the risky areas based on workers' trajectory patterns. Through such developments, this continuous large-scale site monitoring system can guide a construction plant's safety management system more effectively.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.59-64
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• 2014

This paper presents a method for estimating the bounding volume for image-based 3D object reconstruction. The bounding volume of an object is a three-dimensional space where the object is expected to exist, and the size of the bounding volume strongly affects the resolution of the reconstructed geometry. Therefore, the size of a bounding volume should be as small as possible while it encloses an actual object. To this end, the proposed method uses a set of silhouettes of an object and generates a point cloud using a point filter. A bounding volume is then determined as the minimum sphere that encloses the point cloud. The experimental results show that the proposed method generates a bounding volume that encloses an actual object as small as possible.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.2688-2703
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• 2022

Research on the advanced detection of harmful objects in airport cargo for passenger safety against terrorism has increased recently. However, because associated studies are primarily focused on the detection of relatively large objects, research on the detection of small objects is lacking, and the detection performance for small objects has remained considerably low. Here, we verified the limitations of existing research on object detection and developed a new model called the Small Hazardous Object detection enhanced and reconstructed Model based on the You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm to overcome these limitations. We also examined the performance of the proposed model through different experiments based on YOLOv5, a recently launched object detection model. The detection performance of our model was found to be enhanced by 0.3 in terms of the mean average precision (mAP) index and 1.1 in terms of mAP (.5:.95) with respect to the YOLOv5 model. The proposed model is especially useful for the detection of small objects of different types in overlapping environments where objects of different sizes are densely packed. The contributions of the study are reconstructed layers for the Small Hazardous Object detection enhanced and reconstructed Model based on YOLOv5 and the non-requirement of data preprocessing for immediate industrial application without any performance degradation.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.82-82
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• 2014

One of the subjects in clouds' structure and development is small scale structure of interstellar cloud. The possibility of AU scale structure (Marscher et al. 1993; Moore & Marscher 1995; Roy et al. 2012) is discussed, and this small scale structure is considered as the result of hydrogen volume density (Moore & Marscher 1995), or small-scale chemical and other inhomogeneities (Liszt & Lucas 2000). In order to study this subject with emission line, extremely high resolution is mandatory by VLBI system. However, the alternative method could be observing the absorption line of interstellar cloud on the continuum object. In this case, the resolution would be restricted to the size of the continuum object, if the size of the object is smaller than the resolution of a used telescope. We observed the previous researchers' three objects (BLLAC, NRAO150, B0528+138), whose spectrums are changed from 1993 to 1998 (Liszt & Lucas 2000), with KVN. Through KVN observation, we found the changes of optical depth spectrum compared with the previous spectrums. We will discuss the optical depth spectrum variation by time variation and the meaning of it.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.125-132
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new two-stage segmentation method for the effective object recognition which uses region-growing algorithm and k-means clustering method. At first, an image is segmented into many small regions via region growing algorithm. And then the segmented small regions are merged in several regions so that the regions of an object may be included in the same region using typical k-means clustering method. This paper also establishes similarity measurement which is useful for object recognition in an image. Similarity is measured by fuzzy system whose input variables are compactness, magnitude of biasness and orientation of biasness of the object image, which are geometrical features of the object. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage segmentation method and similarity measurement, experiments for object recognition were made and the results show that they are applicable to object recognition under normal circumstance as well as under abnormal circumstance of being.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.661-664
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• 1998

Since the region segmentation at high resolution contains most of viable semantic object contours in an image, the bottom-up approach for image segmentation is appropriate for the application such as MPEG-4 which needs to preserve semantic object contours. However, the conventioal region merging methods, that follow the region segmentation, have poor performance in keeping low-contrast semantic object contours. In this paper, we propose an image segmentation algorithm based on classified region merging. The algorithm pre-segments an image with a large number of small regions, and also classifies it into several classes having similar gradient characteristics. Then regions only in the same class are merged according to the boundary weakness or statisticsal similarity. The simulation result shows that the proposed image segmentation preserves semantic object contours very well even with a small number of regions.