Portraits on the Wall

The focus of “Portraits on the Wall” is discovering the history behind two family heirlooms. Through online archival and ancestry websites, a tentative history of the portraits was found. Once a more clear background was established, a complete line of descent was created starting with the current generations of the family and traced back to one generation previous to the portraits. While searching for answers about the subjects of the portraits, an abundance of family history was unearthed. Everything from local politicians, to Supreme Court cases against step-mothers, successful business owners, to friends of presidents. While investigating the subjects in the portraits, other family events are explored on the journey through eight generations of family history. The main source of information outside of family knowledge was ancestry.com. Through this website, pictures, censuses, marriage licenses, and birth and death records were found to provide additional resources. “The Ewing Genealogy” and bartondatabase.info are both compilations of family histories that intertwined with the descendants of the portraits, making them both extremely valuable sources. Additionally, other family heirlooms including photographs, books, and newspaper clippings were used

Portraits of people with dementia : three case studies of creating portraits

Peer reviewedPreprin

Andy Warhol: Polaroids & Portraits

Enigmatic Andy Warhol claimed he had “no real point to make” in producing art. Yet, his silkscreens, sculptures, paintings, and photographs reveal the artist’s profound interest in the way art intersected with fields like advertising, fashion, film, mass culture, and underground music. In his experimentations with photography and portraiture, Warhol was fascinated with representations of both the individual and the masses and used the Polaroid portrait to illustrate the fine lines between art and popular culture, celebrity and anonymity. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1010/thumbnail.jp

Portraits of Philosophers

This paper presents a close analysis of Steve Pyke’s famous series of portraits of philosophers. By comparing his photographs to other well-known series of portraits and to other portraits of philosophers we will seek a better understanding of the distinctiveness and fittingness of Pyke’s project. With brief nods to Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, G.W.F. Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer and an extensive critical investigation of Cynthia Freeland’s ideas on portraiture in general and her reading of Steve Pyke’s portraits in particular, this paper will also aim to make a contribution to the philosophical debate on portraiture

On pleated singular points of first order implicit differential equations

We study phase portraits of a first order implicit differential equation in a neighborhood of its pleated singular point that is a non-degenerate singular point of the lifted field. Although there is no a visible local classification of implicit differential equations at pleated singular points (even in the topological category), we show that there exist only six essentially different phase portraits, which are presented

Facial transformations of ancient portraits: the face of Caesar

Some software solutions used to obtain the facial transformations can help investigating the artistic metamorphosis of the ancient portraits of the same person. An analysis with a freely available software of portraitures of Julius Caesar is proposed, showing his several "morphs". The software helps enhancing the mood the artist added to a portrait.Comment: Image processing, Facial transformation, Morphing, Portraits, Julius Caesar, Arles bust, Tusculum bus

Recovering Faces from Portraits with Auxiliary Facial Attributes

Recovering a photorealistic face from an artistic portrait is a challenging task since crucial facial details are often distorted or completely lost in artistic compositions. To handle this loss, we propose an Attribute-guided Face Recovery from Portraits (AFRP) that utilizes a Face Recovery Network (FRN) and a Discriminative Network (DN). FRN consists of an autoencoder with residual block-embedded skip-connections and incorporates facial attribute vectors into the feature maps of input portraits at the bottleneck of the autoencoder. DN has multiple convolutional and fully-connected layers, and its role is to enforce FRN to generate authentic face images with corresponding facial attributes dictated by the input attribute vectors. %Leveraging on the spatial transformer networks, FRN automatically compensates for misalignments of portraits. % and generates aligned face images. For the preservation of identities, we impose the recovered and ground-truth faces to share similar visual features. Specifically, DN determines whether the recovered image looks like a real face and checks if the facial attributes extracted from the recovered image are consistent with given attributes. %Our method can recover high-quality photorealistic faces from unaligned portraits while preserving the identity of the face images as well as it can reconstruct a photorealistic face image with a desired set of attributes. Our method can recover photorealistic identity-preserving faces with desired attributes from unseen stylized portraits, artistic paintings, and hand-drawn sketches. On large-scale synthesized and sketch datasets, we demonstrate that our face recovery method achieves state-of-the-art results.Comment: 2019 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV

Stokes tomography of radio pulsar magnetospheres. I. Linear polarization

Polarimetric studies of pulsar radio emission traditionally concentrate on how the Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) varies with pulse longitude, with special emphasis on the position angle (PA) swing of the linearly polarized component. The interpretation of the PA swing in terms of the rotating vector model is limited by the assumption of an axisymmetric magnetic field and the degeneracy of the output with respect to the orientation and magnetic geometry of the pulsar; different combinations of the latter two properties can produce similar PA swings. This paper introduces Stokes phase portraits as a supplementary diagnostic tool with which the orientation and magnetic geometry can be inferred more accurately. The Stokes phase portraits feature unique patterns in the I-Q, I-U, and Q-U planes, whose shapes depend sensitively on the magnetic geometry, inclination angle, beam and polarization patterns, and emission altitude. We construct look-up tables of Stokes phase portraits and PA swings for pure and current-modified dipole fields, filled core and hollow cone beams, and two empirical linear polarization models, L/I = \cos \theta_0 and L/I = \sin \theta_0, where \theta_0 is the colatitude of the emission point. We compare our look-up tables to the measured phase portraits of 24 pulsars in the European Pulsar Network online database. We find evidence in 60% of the objects that the radio emission region may depart significantly from low altitudes, even when the PA swing is S-shaped and/or the pulse-width-period relation is well satisfied. On the other hand, the data are explained adequately if the emission altitude exceeds ~10% of the light cylinder radius. We conclude that Stokes phase portraits should be analysed concurrently with the PA swing and pulse profiles in future when interpreting radio pulsar polarization data.Comment: 60 pages, 58 figures, submitted to MNRAS, accepted 13 Oct 201