Video anatomy : spatial-temporal video profile

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)A massive amount of videos are uploaded on video websites, smooth video browsing, editing, retrieval, and summarization are demanded. Most of the videos employ several types of camera operations for expanding field of view, emphasizing events, and expressing cinematic effect. To digest heterogeneous videos in video websites and databases, video clips are profiled to 2D image scroll containing both spatial and temporal information for video preview. The video profile is visually continuous, compact, scalable, and indexing to each frame. This work analyzes the camera kinematics including zoom, translation, and rotation, and categorize camera actions as their combinations. An automatic video summarization framework is proposed and developed. After conventional video clip segmentation and video segmentation for smooth camera operations, the global flow field under all camera actions has been investigated for profiling various types of video. A new algorithm has been designed to extract the major flow direction and convergence factor using condensed images. Then this work proposes a uniform scheme to segment video clips and sections, sample video volume across the major flow, compute flow convergence factor, in order to obtain an intrinsic scene space less influenced by the camera ego-motion. The motion blur technique has also been used to render dynamic targets in the profile. The resulting profile of video can be displayed in a video track to guide the access to video frames, help video editing, and facilitate the applications such as surveillance, visual archiving of environment, video retrieval, and online video preview

Borderlines: Essays on Mapping and The Logic of Place

Borderlines innovatively explores the ways artistic interventions construct social, cultural, and mental spaces. The fifteen essays bring a broad multidisciplinary approach to the concept of borderlines and its markings through artistic manifestations. Rejecting older "normative"! understandings of the word border lines as signifying semantic irreversibility, this work gives prominence to the plasticity of the combined single word "borderlines." Borderlines is a collection of essays that address the cultural, artistic, conceptual, and performative mapping of places. The essays in this collection "write" borderlines from a wide variety of perspectives, representing diverse disciplines, cultural backgrounds, countries, and generations. It presents the pervasiveness of borderlines as an intellectual, artistic and political concept, across media, theories, and places. Borderlines is intended for academic specialists and students in cultural studies, theatre and performance, media and sound studies

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book

Peace-process infrastructure: constructing landscapes in-between Irelands

Over the course of 30 years ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland led to the rupturing of physical sites from people’s everyday environment. In a post ‘Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’ era, this thesis considers the construction of common ground and the space of encounter as an instrument in peacemaking. I investigate how both the physical and the imagined landscape work together to form what I call peace-process infrastructure: landscapes that bolster a peaceprocess by being re-appropriated for civilian purposes and knit back into their surroundings. Under the practice strand of this study, I use movement as a tactic by choosing a series of traverses that were not possible to undertake as a civilian during the conflict: Divis Mountain next to Belfast City which changed hands from military zone to nature reserve; the now navigable Shannon-Erne Waterway; and the borderline hills between Ireland/European Union and Northern Ireland/United Kingdom where the watchtowers once stood. The garnered film footage works as testimony to a fragile peace-process, which in turn becomes an active archive that generates text. Specific tools that were used at each site to overcome topographical distance — limelight, lock and lens — are deployed once more to make what is considered remote and out of touch, close and tangible. At its heart, this project builds a multi-tiered rendering of particular landscapes — drawing on Hannah Arendt, Edmund Burke, amongst other political, landscape and feminism theorists — but it is motivated by the larger desire to contribute to a worldwide discussion about peace-process situations from a spatial perspective. People’s reactions to the constructed encounter in the world around them are a direct consequence to the architectural systems that command our surroundings. Landscapes hold the potential to deconstruct toxic territorial organisation leading to creative production. Revolutions are not just a protest but a creative process — a tool for remaking states and societies. In world terms the cultural Irish revolution preceded the political revolution galvanising world and Irish opinion towards independence for Ireland in 1916. About one hundred years later, this work creates a cultural milieu about the peace process that gathers strength for its advancement

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections

Screens are ubiquitous today. They display information; present image worlds; are portable; connect to mobile networks; mesmerize. However, contemporary screen media also seek to eliminate the presence of the screen and the visibilities of its boundaries. As what is image becomes increasingly indistinguishable against the viewer’s actual surroundings, this unsettling prompts re-examination about not only what is the screen, but also how the screen demarcates and what it stands for in relation to our understanding of our realities in, outside and against images. Through case studies drawn from three media technologies – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed today, interrogating critical lines between art and life; virtuality and actuality; truth and lies. What we have today is not just the contestation of the real against illusion or the unreal, but the disappearance itself of difference and a gluttony of the unreal which both connect up to current politics of distorted truth values and corrupted terms of information. The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie is thus about not only where the image’s borders and demarcations are established, but also the screen boundary as the instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations that do not tell the truth. In all this, a new imagination for images emerges, with a new space for cultures of presence and absence, definitions of object and representation, and understandings of dis- and re-placement – the post-screen

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections

Screens are ubiquitous today. They display information; present image worlds; are portable; connect to mobile networks; mesmerize. However, contemporary screen media also seek to eliminate the presence of the screen and the visibilities of its boundaries. As what is image becomes increasingly indistinguishable against the viewer’s actual surroundings, this unsettling prompts re-examination about not only what is the screen, but also how the screen demarcates and what it stands for in relation to our understanding of our realities in, outside and against images. Through case studies drawn from three media technologies – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed today, interrogating critical lines between art and life; virtuality and actuality; truth and lies. What we have today is not just the contestation of the real against illusion or the unreal, but the disappearance itself of difference and a gluttony of the unreal which both connect up to current politics of distorted truth values and corrupted terms of information. The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie is thus about not only where the image’s borders and demarcations are established, but also the screen boundary as the instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations that do not tell the truth. In all this, a new imagination for images emerges, with a new space for cultures of presence and absence, definitions of object and representation, and understandings of dis- and re-placement – the post-screen

Mediated Bordering: Eurosur, the Refugee Boat, and the Construction of an External EU Border

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. The author engages with two of its primary building sites - the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto - and would otherwise have - been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics

The inner journey : pilgrimage in South Africa and the modern world

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references.At the heart of this thesis lies the argument that pilgrimage is a universal, longrooted, normal and vital aspect of human behaviour that shows no sign of abating in the modern world; that is is a fluid and flexible process, imbued with a multiplicity of meanings and functions that may fall inside or outside the authentication of large religious traditions and certainly existed before them; that the primary measure of pilgrimage should be that of intent or purpose and therefore pilgrimages can be categorised according to function; and that the inner journey is the most important feature of authentic pilgrimage but does not overrule obligation or traditional practice