Vision-based cooperative estimation via multi-agent optimization

Abstract — In this paper, we investigate a cooperative esti-mation problem for visual sensor networks based on multi-agent optimization techniques. A passivity-based visual motion observer is employed as a tool to meet the objective. We first give an interpretation of the visual motion observer from the viewpoint of optimization and present new inputs motivated by the optimization techniques on manifolds. Based on the investigations, we formulate a novel cooperative estimation problem to be tackled. Then, a cooperative estimation algorithm is presented based on multi-agent optimization techniques. Fi-nally, the effectiveness of the present algorithm is demonstrated through experiments. I

A Phenomenological approach to media art environments: The Immersive art experience and the Finnish art scene

This research focuses on immersive art, defined as a multimedia experience where visitors interact with artwork whilst immersed in a range of sensory experiences. In this dissertation, I investigate the immersive art experience from the perspective of art history, social theory, and media studies situated within a phenomenological theoretical framework. I present a comparative analysis of forms of immersive spatiality, including projected moving-image art, spatial environments, participatory installations, video art installations and interactive environments in the international art scene. One of my objectives is to emphasise the role of video art in the development of interactive and immersive art environments. The growing importance of spectators for giving meaning to the artwork allows immersivity to be analysed in relation to the notions of spectacle and spectatorship. I connect disciplines, practices and concepts by adopting principles from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological writings. Spatiality and motility are pivotal points in immersive experiences. Immersive art, as an embodied mutual experience, materialises the phenomenological concepts of spectatorship, corporeality, motility, porosity, chiasm, and encounter. I have selected a group of relevant Finnish artists from different generations to characterise the development of media art and, particularly, immersive media art in an international context. The group includes Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lauri Astala, Laura Beloff, Hanna Haaslahti, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Erkka Nissinen, and Marjatta Oja. I examine the historical dissemination of phenomenology in Finland and a renewed interest in the 1990s which coincided with the spatialisation of video art and the emergence of immersivity. I also investigate the opening of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and its impact on Finnish culture, and the recent Amos Rex Museum, specifically built for immersive exhibitions. Regarding the unstable nature of media art, I analyse the changes in displaying art collections and exhibitions, the new commitments of art museums and the innovative directions taken by media conservators. My examination of immersive art, with its performativity and transience, reveals environmentally friendly and sustainable aspects.Fenomenologinen tulokulma mediataideympäristöihin. Immersiivinen taidekokemus ja Suomen taidekenttä Tämä tutkimus käsittelee immersiivistä taidetta multimediaalisena kokemuksena. Immersiossa kävijät ovat erilaisten aistimellisten kokemusten ympäröiminä vuorovaikutuksessa taiteen kanssa. Tutkin väitöskirjassani immersiivistä taidekokemusta fenomenologisessa teoriakehyksessä taidehistorian, yhteiskuntateorian ja mediatutkimuksen näkökulmasta. Esitän vertailevan analyysin immersiivisistä tilallisuuden muodoista, joihin sisällytän liikkuvan kuvan projisoinnit, tilateokset, osallistavat installaatiot, videoinstallaatiot ja interaktiiviset ympäristöt kansainvälisen taidekentän ilmiöinä. Yhtenä pyrkimyksenäni on painottaa videotaiteen merkitystä interaktiivisen ja immersiivisen taiteen kehityksessä. Katsojien kasvava rooli taideteoksen merkityksen muodostuksessa tarjoaa perustan immersion analyysille nimenomaan spektaakkelin ja katsojuuden viitekehyksessä. Yhdistän eri tieteenaloja, käytäntöjä ja käsitteitä toisiinsa Maurice Merleau-Pontyn fenomenologisten kirjoitusten avulla. Tilallisuus ja liike ovat immersiivisten kokemusten ytimessä. Jaettuna ruumiillisena kokemuksena immersiivinen taide ilmentää materiaalisesti fenomenologisia katsojuuden, ruumiillisuuden, liikkeessä olemisen, huokoisuuden, kiasman ja kohtaamisen käsitteitä. Olen valinnut joukon eri sukupolvia edustavia suomalaistaiteilijoita hahmot-taakseni mediataiteen ja erityisesti immersiivisen mediataiteen kansainvälisiä kehityskulkuja. Heihin lukeutuvat Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lauri Astala, Laura Beloff, Hanna Haaslahti, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Erkka Nissinen ja Marjatta Oja. Käsittelen fenomenologian saapumista Suomeen sekä siihen 1990-luvulla videotaiteen tilallistumisen ja immersion esiin nousun yhteydessä uudelleen virinnyttä mielenkiintoa. Tarkastelen myös Nykytaiteen museo Kiasman perustamista ja sen vaikutusta suomalaiseen kulttuuriin, samoin kuin vastikään avattua Amos Rex -taidemuseota, joka on rakennettu erityisesti immersiivisiä näyttelyitä silmällä pitäen. Analysoin muutoksia taidekokoelmien ja näyttelyiden esillepanossa, taidemuseoiden uudenlaisia sitoumuksia ja mediataiteen kuratoinnin uutta luovia suuntia suhteessa mediataiteen nopeasti muuttuvaan luonteeseen. Painottamalla performatiivisuutta ja hetkellisyyttä nostan immersiivisen taiteen analyysissani näkyville sen ympäristöystävällisiä ja kestäviä ulottuvuuksia

Now again

Now Again is a participatory performance made up of a series of individual and group activities that create opportunities to notice how we fit and shift in our environment. Reflecting the dance histories of the artists, the variable dynamic possibilities of the city are brought into focus through specific ‘scores’ that, as propositions for engagement, activate simple movement patterns or observations. The aim is to allow responsive noticing of the immediate environment, but also to enliven it in unexpected ways. Individuals who are participants and observers, dedicated or incidental (passers-by), become part of the disclosure of the physical and the social. The rigid structure of the city is re-imagined as a fluid, choreographic entity invested with organic qualities. Performances move between a series of city locations, each with differing activities. Designated ‘nodes’ in the city grid (certain streets, a square, a doorway, footpath, a hole in a wall or a particular tree), have been chosen for their imaginative, affective, or energetic resonances. These are ‘mapped’ by the perambulatory, physical, sensory, and relational engagement of all participants. This is a collective dance created through noticing the feelings and patterns of the physical self in the built, natural, and social environment. In some sites, the artists perform, while in others they lead a participative performance. Ephemeral, self-led, performance experiments designed to disappear into the fabric of the city, will also be invited. A mobile app enables audience participation. The app employs GPS data to trigger information specific to that site (written prompts, sounds and scored provocations)

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

FATED: An Interactive Film with Controllable Point-­‐of-­‐View Camera

The crossover between videogames and film inspires this thesis. It is an attempt to integrate narrative and engagement in digital filmmaking thereby enabling active audience participation in the storytelling process. By analyzing early point-­‐of-­‐view camera experiments and contemporary implementation of these techniques in first-­‐ person shooter games this thesis presents the different values of point-­‐of-­‐view perspective in both games and films. In addition, the thesis explores the impact of film on games via the use of cut scenes, narrative structure and cinematic language in order to uncover some fundamental principles of gameplay experience. Integration of an interactive point-­‐of-­‐view camera technique with traditional cinematography in a linear narrative underpins the filmmaking experimentation of this thesis. By producing a participatory film, the thesis tests this mix of filmmaking techniques and audience engagement, with a result suggesting that the viewing experience was improved

Interrupting time : a photographic examination of the perception of urban temporality

This thesis examines how time is perceived in the urban realm and what role the visual field plays in this perception. My research aims to gain insight into how a unified sense of time is reconciled with the fractured nature of urban temporality. I will investigate the perception of urban temporality in terms of the notion of duration, as theorised by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Fusing artistic photographic practice and sociological theory to interrogate the virtual realm of the city, this thesis attempts to present a nuanced reading of the everyday urban sphere, de-familiarising the everyday in the tradition of Surrealism and transforming the mundane into the sublime. My aim is to make apparent unnoticed or unconscious everyday activities in order to examine the relationship between the individual and the whole of the city, using the moving image as the basis for this investigation. By breaking down moving images into stills and examining the relationship between the still and moving image, I will interrogate the ways that moving images can help us to understand the relationship between the parts and the whole. I will present three photographic projects, each exploring a different yet interrelated element of perception (difference and repetition, the panorama, and light) from a nuanced perspective in order to disrupt existing notions of these elements. In researching the virtual urban realm, I consider whether it is possible to go beyond representation and beyond the human realm (as Deleuze proposed) in order to reach a domain of pure difference and pure presence. By interacting with the urban sphere in a dynamic capacity, a new understanding of the virtual life of the city begins to emerge, which I will argue has potentially important ramifications upon visual sociological research.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Exposed intimacy : a comparative study of self-representation in selected works by Sophie Calle, Vincent Dieutre, and Mariana Otero

This thesis provides a comparative textual, aesthetic, and thematic analysis of self-representation in a selection of films and installations produced in France by three film-makers whose backgrounds and approach to the subject varies: the installation artist, Sophie Calle, the experimental film-maker, Vincent Dieutre, and the documentary film-maker, Marianne Otero. It examines ways in which their films and installations are characterised by certain recurring themes and aesthetic strategies despite their apparent differences. The first chapter contrasts the traditions of literary and pictorial selfrepresentation (autobiography, diary, self-portrait, and essay) with the blurring of such distinct categories in cinema and the visual arts. In the following chapters, a comparative analysis between the three artists points to a recurring representation of a questioning, split, and scattered Self. As a result, a sense of constant in-between-ness emerges, and the protagonists’ systematic spatial dislocations are not merely geographic and physical but also temporal and mental. The aesthetic constructions aptly reflect their interrogation about their place in the world in that the cinematic balance between motion and stillness aptly underscores the fundamental paradox of simultaneous permanence and change, which characterises identity. The abstraction associated with figurations of loss and absence contrasts with a sense of nowness, which is reinforced by the prominence of the body on screen, which harks back to more concrete issues and calls for a reflection on theories of affect, the Figural, sensation. Most importantly, the bodies’ physicality draws attention to the plasticity of the medium, and the fact that the body on screen is also that of the artist is especially effective. Self-representation is a mise en abyme par excellence and cannot be envisaged outside the film-makers’ aesthetic reflection upon their practice for their modes of self-representation rely heavily on the specificity of the medium used. Finally, it draws on recurrent patterns, which simultaneously reflect the rituals of self-representation and the cinematic process: passage, repetition, and transformation, through figures of intermediality, re-enactment, or intertextuality. Yet, equally important are figurations of the place and limits of the Self in relation to the outer space of the Other; hence the significance of margins, thresholds, liminality, in which the question of gender is also central