Unsupervised maritime target detection

The unsupervised detection of maritime targets in grey scale video is a difficult problem in maritime video surveillance. Most approaches assume that the camera is static and employ pixel-wise background modelling techniques for foreground detection; other methods rely on colour or thermal information to detect targets. These methods fail in real-world situations when the static camera assumption is violated, and colour or thermal data is unavailable. In defence and security applications, prior information and training samples of targets may be unavailable for training a classifier; the learning of a one class classifier for the background may be impossible as well. Thus, an unsupervised online approach that attempts to learn from the scene data is highly desirable. In this thesis, the characteristics of the maritime scene and the ocean texture are exploited for foreground detection. Two fast and effective methods are investigated for target detection. Firstly, online regionbased background texture models are explored for describing the appearance of the ocean. This approach avoids the need for frame registration because the model is built spatially rather than temporally. The texture appearance of the ocean is described using Local Binary Pattern (LBP) descriptors. Two models are proposed: one model is a Gaussian Mixture (GMM) and the other, referred to as a Sparse Texture Model (STM), is a set of histogram texture distributions. The foreground detections are optimized using a Graph Cut (GC) that enforces spatial coherence. Secondly, feature tracking is investigated as a means of detecting stable features in an image frame that typically correspond to maritime targets; unstable features are background regions. This approach is a Track-Before-Detect (TBD) concept and it is implemented using a hierarchical scheme for motion estimation, and matching of Scale- Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) appearance features. The experimental results show that these approaches are feasible for foreground detection in maritime video when the camera is either static or moving. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves were generated for five test sequences and the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) was analyzed for the performance of the proposed methods. The texture models, without GC optimization, achieved an AUC of 0.85 or greater on four out of the five test videos. At 50% True Positive Rate (TPR), these four test scenarios had a False Positive Rate (FPR) of less than 2%. With the GC optimization, an AUC of greater than 0.8 was achieved for all the test cases and the FPR was reduced in all cases when compared to the results without the GC. In comparison to the state of the art in background modelling for maritime scenes, our texture model methods achieved the best performance or comparable performance. The two texture models executed at a reasonable processing frame rate. The experimental results for TBD show that one may detect target features using a simple track score based on the track length. At 50% TPR a FPR of less than 4% is achieved for four out of the five test scenarios. These results are very promising for maritime target detection

The Queer Novels of Patrick White

This thesis argues that the representation of sexuality in the novels of Patrick White articulates and performs a queer politics of critique that resists the trope of identity. If the extant body of White scholarship has struggled to make sense of the sexual dimensions of White’s texts, this thesis argues that this is because the sexual politics that White articulates are inherently ambiguous: the closeted aesthetic that White deploys articulates a crisis of representation that is central to White’s queer politics of critique. The failure of White’s prose to fully circumscribe meaning performs a radical deconstruction of identity that disrupts the basis of the political itself. This thesis argues that White’s texts stimulate the gaps, the silences and the ambiguities inherent in the process of signification in order to problematize any narrative of knowable and legible sexual identities. Even in his later texts, where sexuality is thematised more freely and openly, White’s texts still refuse to cohere around a comfortably stable gay identity, emphasising instead the failures and ambiguities that attend any attempt to represent the process of coming out. White’s overt representations of sexuality emerge as a textual performance of jouissance, as the disruption of, rather than expression of, his character’s true identities. In addition to his closeted aesthetic then, this thesis argues that it is in White’s camp sensibility that we might understand the queer politics that inform his texts: the playfulness, the arch humour, and the wit of White’s prose all attest to a critically queer cultural project that is conceived in opposition to the stable referents of politics and identity. The political White that emerges from this thesis is somewhat different to the one with which most critics of White’s texts would be familiar. While White’s status as a social and political activist is well known, it is equally well known that this activism did not extend to the politics of sexuality. This thesis argues that if, or perhaps even because, White opposed the gay rights movement, it is his literary texts that are the site of a queer project that is resolutely opposed to identity politics. White rarely if ever spoke up about the politics of sexuality in his public speeches arguably because his queer project is conceived in opposition to the identity politics that subtends grassroots political activism. White’s opposition to identity politics is expressed – can perhaps only be expressed – as a literary and aesthetic project that stands at a remove from street demonstrations and practical politicking. Queer theory, as a tool of literary analysis, helps us then to articulate a facet of White’s cultural politics that would otherwise remain hidden behind the very public portrait of White the activist

Inter-subjectivity and intra-communality in Ciaran Carson’s Poetic Translations

This thesis presents an analysis of Northern Irish poet, Ciaran Carson’s style of poetic translation in four volumes published between 1998 and 2012: The Alexandrine Plan (1998), The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (2002), The Táin (2007), and In the Light of (2012). The thesis discusses the implementation of transitional structures for all-inclusive self-governance in Northern Ireland in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement, as the central critical context of Carson’s translational poetics. Three main areas of the Good Friday Agreement (dialogue, identity and commemoration) are discussed, both in how they have worked in cross-communal reconciliation of differences and conflict, and in how they are manifested in the practice of Carson’s translations. The critical framework for analysis consists in a sociological approach to dialogue on an inter-subjective, intra-cultural level; theories of poetic translation; and conceptual approaches to civic integration. Jürgen Habermas’s model for self-regulative dialogic practice provides a critical analysis through which to comprehend Carson’s inter-subjective approach to producing a type of translational equivalence. Carson’s ‘close’ equivalence to poetic form frames the inter-subjective exchange between translator and original poet in his commissioned versions of lyric sonnet forms and epic types of verse. His mainly ‘loose’ semantic selection of culturally symbolic signifiers and subjective poetic expression reveals his response to the originals’ contexts and styles and his way of commenting obliquely on his own cultural context. Carson demonstrates significantly different uses of form in the lyric sonnet forms published in 1998 and 2012. While authoritative form, structure and scheme either trap or distance his translated-subjects in the 1998 volume, the unstructured prose Carson selects to produce a new poetic form in the 2012 volume facilitates informal expression through unidentifiable voices and weak rhyme. Carson’s handling of lexis and syntax in the two epic types of verse demonstrate his shift from emotional evocations of communal desire and frustration to grammatical and phrasal constructions that enfold communicative acts and articulate equivalence between cultures. The exclusive and collective focus on the translation volumes presents a specific mode of analogy for individual and collective experiences of being moved into a new formal space and learning the way its language works to profitable cooperative ends

Text and intertextuality: words about music about words

The writings embodied in this thesis relate to five of the six musical works in the accompanying folio in that they consider the range of relationships between words and music in a musical setting of a literary (or at least verbal) text. The musical examples discussed range from the art song to rock and roll, from music-theatre to solo vocal pieces employing extended vocal techniques. Texts range from compl ex poetry to paralinguistics to simple pop lyrics. The thesis draws on the writer\u27s experience as a composer and performer of vocal music, as well as a variety of secondary sources, analytical, musicological and descriptive. A unifying theoretical thread is provided by the poststructuralist concept(s) of intertextuality, both in specific senses proposed by Barthes, Eco and others, and in the more inclusive sense advanced by Kristeva. Part 1 of these writings consists of four, informal radio talks scripted and presented by the author for ABC Radio National in 1989

Brian Ferneyhough : the logic of the figure

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Bodily sensation in contemporary extreme horror film

Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film provides a theory of horror film spectatorship rooted in the physiology of the viewer. In a novel contribution to the field of film studies research, it seeks to integrate contemporary scientific theories of mind with psychological paradigms of film interpretation. Proceeding from a connectionist model of brain function that proposes psychological processes are underpinned by neurology, this thesis contends that whilst conscious engagement with film often appears to be driven by psychosocial conditions – including cultural influence, gender dynamics and social situation – it is physiology and bodily sensation that provide the infrastructure upon which this superstructure rests. Drawing upon the philosophical works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Alain Berthoz, the argument concentrates upon explicating the specific bodily sensations and experiences that contribute to the creation of implicit structures of understanding, or embodied schemata, that we apply to the world round us. Integrating philosophy with contemporary neurological research in the spheres of cognition and neurocinematics, a number of correspondences are drawn between physiological states and the concomitant psychological states often perceived to arise simultaneously alongside them. The thesis offers detailed analysis of a selection of extreme horror films that, it is contended, conscientiously incorporate the body of the viewer in the process of spectatorship through manipulation of visual, auditory, vestibular, gustatory and nociceptive sensory stimulations, simulations and the embodied schemata that arise from everyday physiological experience. The phenomenological film criticism of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks is adopted and expanded upon in order to suggest that the organicity of the human body guides and structures the psychosocial engagement with, and interpretation of, contemporary extreme horror film. This project thus exposes the body as the architectural foundation upon which conscious interaction with film texts occurs

The Piano Works of Adolf Busch: Aspects of Style and Pianism

Adolf Busch (1891–1952) is primarily remembered as one of the greatest German violinists of the twentieth century. He is also noted for his moral integrity and his clear and uncompromising stance against the rise of the Nazis, but the fact that he was also a prolific composer is less known. Influenced by Brahms, Busoni and most of all Max Reger, Busch developed his own uniquely complex and distinctly individual musical language. Existing writing on Busch consists of a major biography, the cataloguing of his compositions, and research into his songs, as well as a range of short essays in journals and festschrifts. References to modernism in Busch’s compositions are apparent in past scholarship, but overall, a broad consensus has been established that his style is tonally and structurally largely traditional. Focusing on the stylistic context of Busch’s piano works, my research mainly confirms this view but further specifies subtle shifts in his musical language, highlighting signs of idiomatic innovation and tonal experimentation, particularly in his middle period. This thesis is the first study of Busch’s piano works. It combines practice research through performance with musicological research and editing of primary sources such as manuscripts held in the Busch Archive. Drawing together research on Busch, musical analysis and the findings of performance practice, I investigate the piano works in the context of twentieth-century music in general and Busch’s oeuvre in particular, specifically with a particular focus on his most substantial contribution to solo piano repertoire, the Sonata Op. 25. Furthermore, I explore the extent to which editorial and wider research impacts upon my pianistic interpretation. The submission consists of: i) a written thesis examining the issues outlined above; ii) a recording of Busch's entire piano works; iii) a later recording of the Sonata Op. 25, using iv) my new edition of this work, prepared from the two available sources: the autograph manuscript of 1922 and the first edition of 1925. Busch’s piano pieces provide an invaluable testimony to the conflict between tradition and innovation in the early twentieth century. I hope that this research will contribute to their rediscovery

Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Examining the significance of women’s work in popular film genres, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers sheds light on women’s contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the book interrogates questions of authorial subversion, gendered concepts of film authorship and male/female genre divisions, as well as re-evaluating certain genres as a space worthy of feminist criticism. By offering an analysis of the films themselves and the circumstances of production and reception, this book redefines political, theoretical and commercial conceptualisations of women’s cinema, and offers new perspectives on how women filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre

Purely Sonorous: The Rhetoric of Sound in Twentieth-Century Music

This thesis investigates a common aesthetic-hermeneutic tendency in discussions of twentieth-century and contemporary music: that of legitimating particular repertoires as exceptionally sound-oriented or sound-based—in contrast with other, usually older music, which is figured as subordinating sound to musical language. In this thesis, I call this tendency ‘sonicism’. I analyse the rhetoric of sonicism on the level both of discourse and of compositional technique. The analysis is comparative: modernist concert music, electroacoustic/electronic music, and sound art are considered. These repertoires, although apparently disparate in their aesthetic and technical premises, imply a common conceptual and metaphorical framework, based on the distinction between ‘sound material’ and its ‘organisation’—hence the rhetorical strategy of hypostatising sound to characterise an advocated approach, while abstracting quasi-linguistic entities and relationships from sound to characterise other music. I argue that beliefs regarding the priority of sound in a given repertoire are determined above all by assumptions about musical organisation. Moreover, in realising their sonic ideals, composers tend to adopt organisational signifiers that are also common to apparently disparate positions. These signifiers negate aspects of traditional musical grammar but tend gradually to be conventionalised in their turn. These core arguments are presented in Chapter 1 and developed through the rest of the thesis. Chapters 2 and 3 are case studies focusing on the discourse, techniques, and reception of two composers associated with particular archetypes: that of the mutual independence of ‘sounds themselves’ (the early Morton Feldman), and that of the journey inside a three-dimensional sound (Giacinto Scelsi). The analysis then turns to electronic music and sound art, highlighting the continuity of both discourse and organisational signifiers. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the present-day situation, in which the emancipation of sound is regarded as a fait accompli, but the standardisation of signifiers is still not widely acknowledged