Content-Aware Unsupervised Deep Homography Estimation

Homography estimation is a basic image alignment method in many applications. It is usually conducted by extracting and matching sparse feature points, which are error-prone in low-light and low-texture images. On the other hand, previous deep homography approaches use either synthetic images for supervised learning or aerial images for unsupervised learning, both ignoring the importance of handling depth disparities and moving objects in real world applications. To overcome these problems, in this work we propose an unsupervised deep homography method with a new architecture design. In the spirit of the RANSAC procedure in traditional methods, we specifically learn an outlier mask to only select reliable regions for homography estimation. We calculate loss with respect to our learned deep features instead of directly comparing image content as did previously. To achieve the unsupervised training, we also formulate a novel triplet loss customized for our network. We verify our method by conducting comprehensive comparisons on a new dataset that covers a wide range of scenes with varying degrees of difficulties for the task. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art including deep solutions and feature-based solutions.Comment: Accepted by ECCV 2020 (Oral, Top 2%, 3 over 3 Strong Accepts). Jirong Zhang and Chuan Wang are joint first authors, and Shuaicheng Liu is the corresponding autho

Visualizing Transmedia Networks: Links, Paths and Peripheries

`Visualizing Transmedia Networks: Links, Paths and Peripheries' examines the increasingly complex rhetorical intersections between narrative and media (`old' and `new') in the creation of transmedia fictions, loosely defined as multisensory and multimodal stories told extensively across a diverse media set. In order to locate the `language' of transmedia expressions, this project calls attention to the formally locatable network structures placed by transmedia producers in disparate media like film, the print novel and video games. Using network visualization software and computational metrics, these structures can be used as data to graph these fictions for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. This study also, however, examines the limits to this approach, arguing that the process of transremediation, where redundancy and multiformity take precedence over networked connection, forms a second axis for understanding transmedia practices, one equally bound to the formation of new modes of meaning and literacy

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Synthetic image generation and the use of virtual environments for image enhancement tasks

Deep learning networks are often difficult to train if there are insufficient image samples. Gathering real-world images tailored for a specific job takes a lot of work to perform. This dissertation explores techniques for synthetic image generation and virtual environments for various image enhancement/ correction/restoration tasks, specifically distortion correction, dehazing, shadow removal, and intrinsic image decomposition. First, given various image formation equations, such as those used in distortion correction and dehazing, synthetic image samples can be produced, provided that the equation is well-posed. Second, using virtual environments to train various image models is applicable for simulating real-world effects that are otherwise difficult to gather or replicate, such as dehazing and shadow removal. Given synthetic images, one cannot train a network directly on it as there is a possible gap between the synthetic and real domains. We have devised several techniques for generating synthetic images and formulated domain adaptation methods where our trained deep-learning networks perform competitively in distortion correction, dehazing, and shadow removal. Additional studies and directions are provided for the intrinsic image decomposition problem and the exploration of procedural content generation, where a virtual Philippine city was created as an initial prototype. Keywords: image generation, image correction, image dehazing, shadow removal, intrinsic image decomposition, computer graphics, rendering, machine learning, neural networks, domain adaptation, procedural content generation

On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation

Imaging Beyond Representation is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on fine art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory - that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive - and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social-media, and bio-politics, On the Verge of Photography offers an invaluable resource for sutdents of visual culture, researchers in the field of digital imagining and artists working with new media. Reading this extraordinary book, it becomes clear that so much of what we knew or thought we knew about photography is at one and the same time accurate and obsolete. With digital photography the image can no longer be discussed or defined for what is it is conventionally assumed to be - a distinct visual unit. This is not a crisis, claim the editors of this timely volume, but an opportunity to step away from the representational terminology that has over-determined the discourse of photography in order to address the image's actual modes of being and becoming: being digitally-born, constantly transmitted, mutated and shared. When images are 'digitally networked' they cannot be isolated as viewed as distinct or unique. This book is a must read for anyone who shares with the authors collected in it an urge to acknowledge the contemporary image as a kind of living organism that intervenes int eh world we share not only by and through the ways we share them. -- Ariella Azoulay, Media/Comparative Literature and Modern Culture Brown Universit

Mangling Cultures: Conflict, Dissonance and Interpretation in Modern Language Studies

From medieval epic and hagiography to modern poetry and cinema and from Central Europe to Brazil, this collection of essays, arising from a graduate day conference, explores questions of conflict and violence in a range of fields from within modern language and literary studies

Mangling Cultures: Conflict, Dissonance and Interpretation in Modern Language Studies

From medieval epic and hagiography to modern poetry and cinema and from Central Europe to Brazil, this collection of essays, arising from a graduate day conference, explores questions of conflict and violence in a range of fields from within modern language and literary studies

Atlantic Archipelagos: A Cultural History of Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1833

This thesis, situated between literature, history and memory studies participates in the modern recovery of the long-obscured relations between Scotland and the Caribbean. I develop the suggestion that the Caribbean represents a forgotten 'lieu de mémoire' where Scotland might fruitfully ‘displace’ itself. Thus it examines texts from the Enlightenment to Romantic eras in their historical context and draws out their implications for modern national, multicultural, postcolonial concerns. Theoretically it employs a ‘transnational’ Atlantic Studies perspective that intersects with issues around creolisation, memory studies, and British ‘Four Nations’ history. Politically it insists on an interrogation of Scottish national narratives that continue to evade issues of empire, race and slavery. Moving beyond a rhetoric of blame, it explores forms of acting and thinking in the present that might help to overcome the injurious legacies of the past. Chapters include an examination of pastoral and georgic modes in Scottish-Caribbean texts. These include well-known authors such as James Thomson, Tobias Smollet, James Grainger, Robert Burns; and less well-known ones such as John Marjoribanks, Charles Campbell, Philip Barrington Ainslie, and the anonymous author of Marly; or a Planter’s Tale (1828). Chapters two to four highlight the way pastoral and georgic modes mediated the representation of ‘improvement’ and the question of free, bonded and enslaved labour across Scotland, Britain and the Caribbean in the era of slavery debates. The fourth chapter participates in and questions the terms of the recovery of two nineteenth century ‘Mulatto-Scots’, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. Bringing ‘Black Atlantic’ issues of race, class, gender, empire and rebellion to the fore, I consider the development of a ‘Scottish-Mulatto’ identity by comparing and contrasting the way these very different figures strategically employed their Scottish heritage. The final chapter moves forward to consider current memorialisations of slavery in the Enlightenment- Romantic period. The main focus is James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003) that engages with Walter Scott’s seminal historical novel Waverley (1814) to weave issues of racial slavery into the familiar narratives of Culloden. Robertson also explores forms of solidarity that might help to overcome those historical legacies in a manner that is suggestive for this thesis as a whole