Color Image Enhancement via Combine Homomorphic Ratio and Histogram Equalization Approaches: Using Underwater Images as Illustrative Examples

The histogram is one of the important characteristics of grayscale images, and the histogram equalization is effective method of image enhancement. When processing color images in models, such as the RGB model, the histogram equalization can be applied for each color component and, then, a new color image is composed from processed components. This is a traditional way of processing color images, which does not preserve the existent relation or correlation between colors at each pixel. In this work, a new model of color image enhancement is proposed, by preserving the ratios of colors at all pixels after processing the image. This model is described for the color histogram equalization (HE) and examples of application on color images are given. Our preliminary results show that the application of the model with the HE can be effectively used for enhancing color images, including underwater images. Intensive computer simulations show that for single underwater image enhancement, the presented method increases the image contrast and brightness and indicates a good natural appearance and relatively genuine color

Self-Representation in an Expanded Field

Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today. Ace LehnerEdito

Virtual Nature: A practice-led enquiry into the relationship between painting and vernacular photography through the process of the painted monotype

My practice-led research explores the relationship between painting and vernacular photography through the process of painted monotypes. This project has developed from an ongoing fascination with the visual qualities of photography and what happens when you translate photographs into other material forms, such as painting. The aim of this project is to develop images that interrogate how painted monotypes provide a distinctive interpretation of embodied experience through their visual, material and sensory qualities. Today, like no other time in history, photography is embedded in our daily lives through hand-held devices and the interface of the digital screen. My research examines how this embedded experience of the photographic relates to the processes and visual qualities of the painted monotype. The project is focused on three primary locations as subject matter: the aquarium, the botanical glasshouse and the habitat diorama. Through my research I explore how these sites function in optically and conceptually similar ways to the world of images, through shared notions of virtuality and indexicality. This research is informed by the work of Édouard Vuillard, Mamma Andersson, Peter Doig, David Hockney and the landscapes of Gustav Klimt. These painters interrogate the territory between painting and lens-based images in very specific ways, relating to visual perception, embodied vision, figure and ground relationships, and visual textures. In a theoretical context, my examination of the relationship between painting and photography has been motivated by the writings of Elizabeth Wynne Easton, Aaron Scharf, John Berger and Russell Ferguson; while Anne Friedberg, Rob Shields, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Geoffrey Batchen, Kris Paulsen and Johanna Love have been instrumental in determining a connection to the virtual and the index in my research

The Kodak Picture Spot sign: American photographic viewing and twentieth-century corporate visual culture

This dissertation is the first in-depth study focusing solely on Kodak Picture Spots — signs placed into the landscape that highlight particular views and promote specific subjects to photograph. Eastman Kodak Company placed these branded markers along the roadside beginning in the 1920s, in several World’s Fairs from mid-century through the 1980s, and at various Disney parks from the late 1950s until Kodak’s bankruptcy in 2012. These picture-taking signs encouraged and mediated sightseeing in order to spur photographic activity, sell product, and equate places with pictures. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation examines the roles these little-studied photographic objects and their vernacular corporate-controlled views, settings, and activities play in the acquisition and distribution of images, real and ideal. Recommended views have a long history, dating back to eighteenth-century British pre-selected vistas and lasting into twenty-first-century digital culture. Picture Spots promote what Nathan Jurgenson calls “conspicuous photography,” a unique set of expectations and actions tied to corporate culture and technology. Chapter One explores Picturesque-era precursors related to gardens, tourism, and accoutrements such as maps and optical devices, including the Claude Glass and stereoscope, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America. Chapter Two examines early American tourism and the initial Kodak campaign of an estimated 5,000 metal signs placed along new roads between 1920 and 1925. Chapter Three charts Kodak’s long-standing association with international expositions, concentrating on the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair where Kodak installed nearly 50 signs. Chapter Four considers the partnership of Kodak and Disney, starting with the debut of Picture Spot signs at Disneyland circa 1959 and subsequent incorporation into all U.S. Disney parks. The dissertation concludes with developments in smaller venues as well as contemporary corporate viewing via social media and camera phones. Selfie sticks and other accessories also aid in reifying conspicuous photography in new and interrelated ways. Due to the ubiquity of photographs today, further aggregated on the internet by enthusiasts using hashtags, picture-taking signs have developed into nostalgic objects and tourist destinations unto themselves

Capturing Culture: The Practical Application of Holographic Recording for Artefacts Selected from the Heritage and Museums of the Arabian Peninsula

Recording cultural heritage is one of the most important issues for consideration in the twenty- first century. Safeguarding, protecting and preserving heritage, through effective mechanism, is of crucial importance. Holographic technology has the potential to offer an appropriate solution to solve issues in documenting, cataloguing and replaying the original optical information of the artefact in three-dimensional imaging. This thesis investigates the relationship between art and technology through holograms recorded as part of a practice-based research programme. It questions whether the holographic medium can be used to capture and disseminate information for use in audience interaction, and therefore raise public awareness, by solving the problem of displaying the original artefacts outside the museum context. Using holographic records of such valuable items has the potential to save them from being lost or destroyed, and opens up the prospect of a new form of virtual museum. This research examines the possibility of recording valuable and priceless artefacts using a mobile holographic recording system designed for museums. To this end, historical, traditional and cultural artefacts on display in Saudi heritage museums have been selected. This project involves the recording of ancient Arabian Peninsula cultural heritage, and in particular jewellery artefacts that we perceive as three-dimensional images created, using holographic wavefront information. The research adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods and critical review of relevant literature on the holographic medium to determine how it might provide an innovative method of engaging museums in Saudi Arabia. The findings of this research offer an original contribution to knowledge and understanding for scholars concerned with conservation of Saudi Arabia’s cultural heritage

All Things Visible and Invisible: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Christian Missions in Modern China

"All Things Visible and Invisible" is a transnational history of visual practices situated in Sino-US cultural and religious encounters across the Republican era and the early PRC. This study examines photography and filmmaking as visual world-making – a collective culture of vernacular visual practices and image-based knowledge production. I investigate the ways in which American Protestant and Catholic missionaries imaged their experiences in China while developing a visual “missionary modernity” (ways of seeing shaped by modern cross-cultural and religious perceptions) against the backdrop of local and national Chinese histories. I take into close account the specific imaging technologies – variations in image-making processes and equipment – that structured these practices and their historical afterlives. As mobile material artifacts, still images and films also circulated representations of on-the-ground experiences across transnational cultural networks, visually bridging China and the world. These visual practices ultimately escaped their missionary mold and entered greater trans-Pacific cultural imaginations, uniquely mediating Chinese and American identities while shaping modern visions of a global East Asia. Drawing from a large body of previously unexamined photographs, films, and private and institutional documents, I map the history of American missionary visual practices onto a larger trans-regional history of Republican China (and after 1949, the early People’s Republic of China) between 1921 and 1951. I begin by tracing American Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries’ first visual encounters with interwar China, and then continuing into connections between photographic experience and religious conversion; vernacular filmmaking and translations of time and local community; and missionary visual practices as shaped by the contingencies of the Second Sino-Japanese War. I conclude with links between visual imagination and nostalgia surrounding the American missionary enterprise’s postwar decline and the competing rise of the People’s Republic. In sum, "All Things Visible and Invisible" argues that visual practices were central to American missionaries’ ways of envisioning modern China and Chinese communities’ representation in transnational cultural and religious institutions – even as the world itself radically reshaped those behind and in front of the lens.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137035/1/jwho_1.pd

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 60 Number 1, Fall 2018

24 - FOUND IN TRANSLATION The Pulitzer for editorial cartooning recognizes the tale of two Syrian refugee families. Here’s who translated their story. By Tracy Seipel and Tina Vossugh. 26 - LEGENDS OF THE COURT A pair of Bronco hoops legends: Steve Nash ’96, welcome to the Basketball Hall of Fame! Kurt Rambis ’80, on big-time break-ins—and a fan club like no other. Words by Mark Purdy and Sam Farmer. Illustrations by Victor Juhasz. 34 - A JOURNEY THROUGH THE HOLY LAND Israel, from a hazy gray sea to the House of Bread to the Hill of the Skull. Learning how experience can illuminate the Gospels. By Ron Hansen M.A. ’95. 38 - MAPS AND LEGENDS Five missions, a would-be Eagle Scout, a maverick priest, and reconciling past and present. Here’s how the maps of the future were changed—and how a cocky young writer got some stern advice. By Michael S. Malone ’75, MBA ’77. 44 - UNDAUNTED Lizbeth Mateo J.D. ’16 crosses boundaries—both geopolitical lines and barriers society erects. A rare undocumented person holding statewide office, she helps underserved students enter college. By Katia Savchuk.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1130/thumbnail.jp

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 60 Number 1, Fall 2018

24 - FOUND IN TRANSLATION The Pulitzer for editorial cartooning recognizes the tale of two Syrian refugee families. Here’s who translated their story. By Tracy Seipel and Tina Vossugh. 26 - LEGENDS OF THE COURT A pair of Bronco hoops legends: Steve Nash ’96, welcome to the Basketball Hall of Fame! Kurt Rambis ’80, on big-time break-ins—and a fan club like no other. Words by Mark Purdy and Sam Farmer. Illustrations by Victor Juhasz. 34 - A JOURNEY THROUGH THE HOLY LAND Israel, from a hazy gray sea to the House of Bread to the Hill of the Skull. Learning how experience can illuminate the Gospels. By Ron Hansen M.A. ’95. 38 - MAPS AND LEGENDS Five missions, a would-be Eagle Scout, a maverick priest, and reconciling past and present. Here’s how the maps of the future were changed—and how a cocky young writer got some stern advice. By Michael S. Malone ’75, MBA ’77. 44 - UNDAUNTED Lizbeth Mateo J.D. ’16 crosses boundaries—both geopolitical lines and barriers society erects. A rare undocumented person holding statewide office, she helps underserved students enter college. By Katia Savchuk.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1130/thumbnail.jp

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2016

This Research Report presents the FY16 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs)