Approximate Nearest Neighbor Fields in Video

We introduce RIANN (Ring Intersection Approximate Nearest Neighbor search), an algorithm for matching patches of a video to a set of reference patches in real-time. For each query, RIANN finds potential matches by intersecting rings around key points in appearance space. Its search complexity is reversely correlated to the amount of temporal change, making it a good fit for videos, where typically most patches change slowly with time. Experiments show that RIANN is up to two orders of magnitude faster than previous ANN methods, and is the only solution that operates in real-time. We further demonstrate how RIANN can be used for real-time video processing and provide examples for a range of real-time video applications, including colorization, denoising, and several artistic effects.Comment: A CVPR 2015 oral pape

Stailaus asunnon myyntivalttina

Myyntistailauksen lähtökohtana on korostaa asunnon parhaita puolia, nopeuttaa myyntiä sekä auttaa saamaan paras mahdollinen kauppahinta myytävästä asunnosta. Tämän opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena on kartoittaa niitä keinoja joilla toivottuun lopputulokseen parhaiten päästään. Tavoitteena on että asunnonmyyjät kiinnittäisivät enemmän huomiota asuntonsa sisustukseen myyntitilanteessa ja näkisivät stailauspalvelun mahdollisuudet myyntiä edistävinä seikkoina. Yhteistyökumppanina tässä työssä toimii Huoneistokeskus Oy. Tutkimusmenetelminä tässä opinnäytetyössä on käytetty havainnointia ja haastatteluja. Myyntistailaus tähtää aina asunnon myyntiin, joten asuntokauppaprosessi ja sen vaiheet ovat osa tätä tutkimusta. Myös mielikuvamarkkinoinnilla on tärkeä rooli onnistuneen asuntokaupan syntymisessä, sillä ostopäätös perustuu yleensä järjen lisäksi tunnereaktioon. Stailistin asiakas on asunnon myyjä, mutta oleellista palvelun kannalta on ymmärtää ostajan näkökulma uuden asunnon hankinnassa. Tällöin stailaukselle saadaan tarpeellinen perusta. Stailauspalvelu on asiakaslähtöistä suunnittelua. Suomessa palvelua tarjoavat toistaiseksi pääasiassa sisustussuunnittelijat, joten mahdollisuuksia pelkästään myyntiin tähtäävälle asuntostailauspalvelulle on. Tärkeää on stailistin ja kiinteistönvälittäjän välinen toimiva yhteistyö.The starting point of home styling is to highlight the best features of a house to speed up the sale as well as help to get the best possible price when the property is sold. The purpose of this study is to identify the means by which the desired outcome is best achieved. The aim is that the home sellers pay more attention to interior design and see the potential for a styling service to promote the sale of their property. The partner in this work is Huoneistokeskus Oy. The research in this thesis has used observation and interviews. Home styling aims at selling the houses, so the housing market is part of this research. Image marketing has an important role when creating successful housing sales, because the purchase decision is usually based on common sense in addition to emotional reaction. The stylists’ client is a home seller, but it is essential to the service to understand the buyer's point of view. That gives the necessary foundation for styling. Styling service is a customer-driven design. In Finland, this service is so far provided by interior designers and there may be further opportunities for a home styling service. Working co-operation between the stylist and real estate agent is crucial

The Perfect Pitch: Car Commercials in the Environment

Car commercials, like many advertisements, tempt its viewers with comfort, capability, or safety features, as well as being well‐engineered, affordable, attractive, large or compact sized, or fuel efficient. This study examines the pitches in YouTube car commercial video clips from the 1960s until 2014. We coded a total of 263 total car commercials based on pitch, setting, narrator, decade, and country of origin. The analysis revealed that most car commercials were presented in rural settings and capability was pitched most frequently overall. Fuel efficiency was ranked third overall; however, within urban settings, fuel efficiency had the highest frequency. During the 1990s, there was no presence of commercials alluding to fuel efficiency and instead safety was pitched more frequently compared to other decades. We discuss the other pitches that were found to be significantly different between the settings, narrators, decades, and countries of origin. Over time, pitches in car commercials have changed, perhaps because advertising is influenced by consumer demands, interests, and concerns

Storying leaks for sharing: The case of leaking the “Moscovici draft” on Twitter

This article proposes a discourse-narrative approach to news making online as a networked practice of storying and sharing. This approach is illustrated in the examination of the release of a draft Eurogroup statement via journalist Paul Mason’s Facebook, Scribd and Twitter accounts on the 16th February 2015. The analysis draws on small story insights (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and the empirical framework of sharing (Androutsopoulos, 2014). It shows how the release of this leak event on Twitter is storied as a breaking news story unfolding moment-by-moment as it happens, at the same time as making up an incipient record of the event as it happened. It is argued that breaking news (micro)stories are shared as moments of narrative stancetaking, featuring a concise, portable storyline and cumulative evaluation(s) that foreground the relevance of the leak for the ongoing discussions on the Greek bailout negotiations as well as the continued importance of the journalist as the mediator of the leak. In this case of sharing a leaked document with networked participants, narrativity is drawn upon as a key resource for producing and circulating alternative stances on the Greek crisis, creating a range of networked participation positions. This article contributes to the study of news sharing online and digital storytelling based on the qualitative analysis of ‘small’ data

Styling the Future. A philosophical account of scenarios & design

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style (Mort, 1996) – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times (Whicher et al., 2015) see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed (Brown, 2008; Martin, 2009; Neumeier, 2009) as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes (1995, p.31), ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact (Flynn & Chatman, 2004; Cox, 2005). A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking (especially scenario planning (e.g. Schwartz, 1991; Li, 2014; Ramírez & Selin, 2014), but also some work from organisation and management studies (e.g. Tsoukas, 2005a, 2005b)), and an encounter with philosophy (particularly the work of Deleuze & Guattari (1984, 1987, 1994). We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living (both individuals and organisations)

Development of a simple information pump.

The Information Pump (IP) is a methodology that aims to counter the problems arising from traditional subjective product data collection. The IP is a game theory based process that aims to maximise information extracted from a panel of subjects, while maintaining their interest in the process through a continuous panelist scoring method. The challenge with implementing this arises from the difficulty in executing the 'game'. In its original format, there is an assumption that the game is played with each player using their own PC to interact with the process. While this in theory allows information and scores to flow in a controlled manner between the players, it actually provides a major barrier to the wider adoption of the IP method. This barrier is two-fold: it is costly and complex, and it is not a natural manner for exchanging information. The core objective is to develop a low cost version of the IP method. This will use the game theory approach to maintain interest among participants and maximise information extraction, but remove the need for each participant to have their own PC interface to the game. This will require replacing both the inter-player communication method and the score keeping/reporting