Hierarchy Composition GAN for High-fidelity Image Synthesis

Despite the rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in image synthesis in recent years, the existing image synthesis approaches work in either geometry domain or appearance domain alone which often introduces various synthesis artifacts. This paper presents an innovative Hierarchical Composition GAN (HIC-GAN) that incorporates image synthesis in geometry and appearance domains into an end-to-end trainable network and achieves superior synthesis realism in both domains simultaneously. We design an innovative hierarchical composition mechanism that is capable of learning realistic composition geometry and handling occlusions while multiple foreground objects are involved in image composition. In addition, we introduce a novel attention mask mechanism that guides to adapt the appearance of foreground objects which also helps to provide better training reference for learning in geometry domain. Extensive experiments on scene text image synthesis, portrait editing and indoor rendering tasks show that the proposed HIC-GAN achieves superior synthesis performance qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Changing the Traditional High School Photography Curriculum: Integrating Traditional and Digital Technologies

This thesis presents a photography curriculum for a beginning high school level photography class. It is designed as a teaching guide to structure a photography class that incorporates both film photography and digital photographic technology. One of the biggest challenges for teachers of photography is how to structure a curriculum with a limited number of enlargers and space in the darkroom, while incorporating digital technology with limited computer access for students. The curriculum presented here includes three major parts: a traditional photographic film component, a digital photography component, and a concepts component where students will experiment with different photographic techniques of manipulation as well as tackle photographic history, criticism, and visual literacy

The Commodification of the Celebrity Portrait: An Analysis of Photographic Business Practice in Relation to Image Mass Production in London c.1857-1880

The mass-produced carte de visite was a new kind of celebrity portrait. It was affordable and available to a wide middle-class market, and it was hugely popular in the 1860s and 1870s. The cartes are extant in large numbers today and offer a valuable Victorian archive ripe for investigation, yet they have, so far, been deemed of little historical value, and consequently have been under-researched in the history of photography. This thesis is centred around a large collection of over one thousand celebrity cartes de visite in the author’s possession. Patterns running through the archive have been identified, and show that a great deal can be learnt about photographers’ business strategies and middle-class society from the images. The first half of the thesis explores the structure of the new carte de visite business in two chapters: in its commercial organisation and in the construction and presentation of the product to a target middle-class market. The establishment of a new profession is highlighted in which commercial activity was displayed more openly on the product as the century progressed, and in which widened middle-class interests were presented in content. Three following case studies provide a deeper investigation in relation to particular subject areas, those of monarchy, government and Church, chosen especially as they were traditional portrait areas used to define the British constitution. These case studies show that studios adapted their output to meet collectors’ changing views on the role of celebrity whilst retaining an underlying representation of the ‘character’ of a new enlightened society. The thesis spotlights a new archive through which a clearer understanding of mid-Victorian business and society can be gained: the research therefore not only fills a gap in photographic history, but adds to knowledge on mid-Victorian middle-class culture

Material Vision : A Portrait of Change from Victorianism to Modernism in America

This study is a portrait of Victorian culture in America as it is represented in the photographic album and an examination of the album as an artifact of material culture. The album is viewed as a material and visual reference and the photograph as an historical document. Parallels are drawn between the album\u27s structure, pictorial content and presentation, and compare similarly to the infra-structure of the society. A series of four photographic collections establish a chronology from the 1860s to the early twentieth century, while each documents the changes in the process and presentation of the photographic medium respectively, the four collections provide evidence that signify changes in social attitudes and behaviors that were occurring from 1860s to early 1900s