Automatic and topology-preserving gradient mesh generation for image vectorization

Demonska vjera polazi od toga da se ne nalazi isključivo u nevjeri, nego je ona onkraj nevjere. Ovim radom smo prvo željeli prikazati glavne postavke najbitnijih elemenata teologalne vjere da bismo kasnije kroz filozofske teze F. Hadjadja prikazali glavna obilježja vjere zlih demona koja su duhovnog karaktera i predstavljaju veliku opasnost za čovjeka i njegovu vjeru. Unatoč različitim tumačenjima, Hadjadj želi upozoriti na to da se zli demoni ne nalaze samo među ateistima, agnosticima i ostalim pokretima koji, na neki način, niječu Božu opstojnost, nego ti zli demoni zapravo vjeruju, pa zato za polazište uzima redak iz Jakovljeve poslanice u kojoj piše da oni „vjeruju i dršću”. Na kraju smo ovim radom prikazali važnost sinteze duše i tijela, odnosno utjelovljenja u kršćanstvu jer je misterij katoličke vjere misterij utjelovljenja i nemoguće je odbacivati tjelesnost kao što je to slučaj u različitim spiritualističkim dimenzijama.Demonic faith is not strictly associated with infidelity itself, but rather exists beyond it. This work aims to present the main postulates of the most crucial elements of the theological faith in order to show, using F. Hadjadj's philosophical thesis, the main characteristics associated with evil demons, which are of the spiritual nature and present great danger for man and his faith. Despite various interpretations, Hadjadj wishes to point out that evil demons do not dwel lonly within atheists, agnostics and other movements which, in a way, negate the existence of God, but that these evil demons actually do believe, and therefore he uses as a starting point the line from the Epistle of Jacob that states that demons „believe and tremble”. In the end, this work presented the importance of the body-soul synthesis, which is the incarnation in Christianity, since the mistery of the Catholic faith is the mistery of the incarnation, and it is impossible to discard corporeality, which is the case in various spiritual dimensions

VectorTalker: SVG Talking Face Generation with Progressive Vectorisation

High-fidelity and efficient audio-driven talking head generation has been a key research topic in computer graphics and computer vision. In this work, we study vector image based audio-driven talking head generation. Compared with directly animating the raster image that most widely used in existing works, vector image enjoys its excellent scalability being used for many applications. There are two main challenges for vector image based talking head generation: the high-quality vector image reconstruction w.r.t. the source portrait image and the vivid animation w.r.t. the audio signal. To address these, we propose a novel scalable vector graphic reconstruction and animation method, dubbed VectorTalker. Specifically, for the highfidelity reconstruction, VectorTalker hierarchically reconstructs the vector image in a coarse-to-fine manner. For the vivid audio-driven facial animation, we propose to use facial landmarks as intermediate motion representation and propose an efficient landmark-driven vector image deformation module. Our approach can handle various styles of portrait images within a unified framework, including Japanese manga, cartoon, and photorealistic images. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of VectorTalker in both vector graphic reconstruction and audio-driven animation

Scribble-based gradient mesh recoloring

Previous gradient mesh recoloring methods usually have dependencies on an additional reference image and the rasterized gradient mesh. To circumvent such dependencies, we propose a user scribble-based recoloring method, in which users are allowed to annotate gradient meshes with a few color scribbles. Our approach builds an auxiliary mesh from gradient meshes, namely control net, by taking both colors and local color gradients at mesh points into account. We then develop an extended chrominance blending method to propagate the user specified colors over the control net. The recolored gradient mesh is finally reconstructed from the recolored control net. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple gradient meshes. Compared with various alternative solutions, our method has no color bleedings nor sampling artifacts, and can achieve fast performance

Devito: Towards a generic Finite Difference DSL using Symbolic Python

Domain specific languages (DSL) have been used in a variety of fields to express complex scientific problems in a concise manner and provide automated performance optimization for a range of computational architectures. As such DSLs provide a powerful mechanism to speed up scientific Python computation that goes beyond traditional vectorization and pre-compilation approaches, while allowing domain scientists to build applications within the comforts of the Python software ecosystem. In this paper we present Devito, a new finite difference DSL that provides optimized stencil computation from high-level problem specifications based on symbolic Python expressions. We demonstrate Devito's symbolic API and performance advantages over traditional Python acceleration methods before highlighting its use in the scientific context of seismic inversion problems.Comment: pyHPC 2016 conference submissio

Image editing and interaction tools for visual expression

Digital photography is becoming extremely common in our daily life. However, images are difficult to edit and interact with. From a user's perspective, it is important to interact freely with the images on his/her smartphone or ipad. In this thesis we develop several image editing and interaction systems with this idea in mind. We aim for creating visual models with pre-computed internal structures such that interaction is readily supported. We demonstrate that such interactable models, driven by a user's hand, can render powerful visual expressiveness, and make static pixel arrays much more fun to play with. The first system harnesses the editing power of vector graphics. We convert raster images into a vector representation using Loop's subdivision surfaces. An image is represented by a multi-resolution feature-preserving sparse control mesh, with which image editing can be done at semantic level. A user can easily put a smile on a face image, or adjust the level of scene abstractness through a simple slider. The second system allows one to insert an object from image into a new scene. The key is to correct the shading on the object such that it goes consistently with the scene. Unlike traditional approach, we use a simple shape to capture gross shading effects and a set of shading detail images to account for visual complexities. The high-frequency nature of these detail images allows a moderate range of interactive composition effects without causing alarming visual artifacts. The third system is on video clips instead of a single image. We proposed a fully automated algorithm to creat