Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

3D face recognition using photometric stereo

Automatic face recognition has been an active research area for the last four decades. This thesis explores innovative bio-inspired concepts aimed at improved face recognition using surface normals. New directions in salient data representation are explored using data captured via a photometric stereo method from the University of the West of England’s “Photoface” device. Accuracy assessments demonstrate the advantage of the capture format and the synergy offered by near infrared light sources in achieving more accurate results than under conventional visible light. Two 3D face databases have been created as part of the thesis – the publicly available Photoface database which contains 3187 images of 453 subjects and the 3DE-VISIR dataset which contains 363 images of 115 people with different expressions captured simultaneously under near infrared and visible light. The Photoface database is believed to be the ?rst to capture naturalistic 3D face models. Subsets of these databases are then used to show the results of experiments inspired by the human visual system. Experimental results show that optimal recognition rates are achieved using surprisingly low resolution of only 10x10 pixels on surface normal data, which corresponds to the spatial frequency range of optimal human performance. Motivated by the observed increase in recognition speed and accuracy that occurs in humans when faces are caricatured, novel interpretations of caricaturing using outlying data and pixel locations with high variance show that performance remains disproportionately high when up to 90% of the data has been discarded. These direct methods of dimensionality reduction have useful implications for the storage and processing requirements for commercial face recognition systems. The novel variance approach is extended to recognise positive expressions with 90% accuracy which has useful implications for human-computer interaction as well as ensuring that a subject has the correct expression prior to recognition. Furthermore, the subject recognition rate is improved by removing those pixels which encode expression. Finally, preliminary work into feature detection on surface normals by extending Haar-like features is presented which is also shown to be useful for correcting the pose of the head as part of a fully operational device. The system operates with an accuracy of 98.65% at a false acceptance rate of only 0.01 on front facing heads with neutral expressions. The work has shown how new avenues of enquiry inspired by our observation of the human visual system can offer useful advantages towards achieving more robust autonomous computer-based facial recognition

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan

The Toy Like Nature: On the History and Theory of Animated Motion

This dissertation examines some key assumptions behind our prevailing idea of animation, arguing that our idea of animation is not, as is often implicitly assumed, an ahistorical category of manipulated imagery, but the result of a complex network of contingent processes. These assumptions, from the aesthetic end, largely emerged from the postwar rise of figurative (or noncartoon, nonabstract) animation—a “new era” which critic André Martin characterized as “marked by the widest possible range of techniques and processes.” From the other end, animation is tied to widespread assumptions from science that assert the biological, automatic nature of visual illusion. Animation’s unique status as a medium of visual movement that can arise from any kind of material (drawings, puppets, computer graphics, etc.), thus yields a paradox that I call “animated automatism”: the fact that, in order to assert its open-ended freedom as an art form, animation must acknowledge the reductive mechanics of perception. The dissertation examines these tensions between aesthetics and science by weaving together moments in the history of figurative animation with moments in the history of animation’s theorization, arguing for the importance of oft-neglected thinkers as animation theorists in the process. Chapter one analyzes philosopher Stanley Cavell’s remarks on cartoons in context with the rise of figurative animation against cartoons, and against the emergence of film studies as an academic discipline. Chapter two analyzes a significant overlap between the methods of animator Norman McLaren and Gestalt psychologist Albert Michotte to argue that the history of figurative animation shares protocols of optical testing with the history of the study of perception. Chapter three examines two major theorists of early trickfilms, critic Rollin Lynde Hartt and poet Vachel Lindsay, as proto-animation theorists who found early cinema’s significance in the push-and-pull between illusion and explanation. Chapter four reads Michael Barrier’s 1970s cartoon journal Funnyworld against the celebrated practice of John and Faith Hubley to indicate a modernist crisis in the understanding of animation. Two brief excurses examine the assumptions behind Michotte and 1960s/70s art critic Annette Michelson’s neglect of animation as a category of film

The Narratology of Comic Art

By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.Peer reviewe

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationTransgressing norms and barriers of mundane digital spaces to seize spotlight in the name of social change is breathtaking. Such are modern-day protest groups as they utilize a special mix of skills, tactics, and resourcefulness to become forces of disruptive tensions in the spectacular seas of image-whirls, sound-waves, and incredible storyscapes in which we live. "Femen and Assemblage Politics of Protest in the Age of Social Media" examines these disruptive tensions as created by the topless female activist group Femen. Specifically, I am interested in how human and nonhuman elements in Femen activism create lasting impressions in the fleeting everyday life of the millions of internet-connected individuals around the globe. I conceptualize these processes under the name of media-activism assemblage and illustrate the work of Femen protest politics through three different case studies. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we see the dynamics of the Kiev 2012 cutting down of the crucifix by Femen

Seeing the Spell: Baroque, Decadence, and a Cinema of Digital-Animated Liberation

This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth-century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally-animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of narrative vs. spectacle, and instead propose a concept of narrativized spectacle whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinemas capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbusters spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertations invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality rather than marginality of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be and, the dissertation seeks to show, were deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action

Art’s Public Lives: Sculpture in China After 1949.

This dissertation considers through sculpture how after the Communist Revolution in 1949 the official line in China for art to serve “the people,” or renmin, sought to institutionalize a new value system in the arts. Specifically, how did the idea of "the people" shape artistic practice and how did the artist through his or her artwork will the concept of "the people" into being? What was the role of sculpture in mobilizing the masses around the idea of “the people”? The case studies of three important sculptural projects--Monument to the People’s Heroes (1952-1958), the Sichuan Sculpture Exhibition (1964), and Rent Collection Courtyard (1965)--reveal the actual challenge of shaping into concrete form an idea on which the Chinese state grounded its own sense of nation. By focusing on how sculpture was interacting with its audience rather than what is being represented, this study asserts the centrality of sculptural aesthetics involving three-dimensional scale, materiality, and process in engaging the viewer with the politics of postwar socialist China. Sculpture’s significance under the leadership of Mao Zedong lies not only in how sculpture functioned as a visual and tangible national symbol to assert a certain definition of “the people,” but also in how it posited a new kind of people, or humanism, for the world during the rise of international Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. By way of rigorous visual analysis, archival research, and personal interviews, this study also reveals the uneven development of cultural production on the ground versus the state’s absolute vision, which included tasking artists in early Communist China to create a new culture for a new nation.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116643/1/vli_1.pd