Processing images and video for an impressionist effect

This paper describes a technique that transforms ordinary video segments into animations that have a hand-painted look. Our method is the first to exploit temporal coherence in video clips to design an automatic filter with a hand-drawn animation quality, in this case, one that produces an Impressionist effect. Off-the-shelf image processing and rendering techniques are employed, modified and combined in a novel way. This paper proceeds through the process step by step, providing helpful hints for tuning the off-the-shelf parts as well as describing the new techniques and bookkeeping used to glue the parts together. 1

Painting in the light of digital reproduction

"The proliferation of digital photographs on the Internet is incomprehensibly vast. These images owe much to the categories and styles of traditional photography, yet often it is their unmediated low quality, in terms of selection, composition, and compression, which is particularly elevated to prominence by the new medium. The Internet represents a near infinite expansion of the mail-order catalogue, amateur snapshot or analogue video; a way of collecting visual information where the aesthetics of simple functionality or mediocrity is observed, as there is virtually no material cost involved. Photographers, filmmakers and painters have already trawled the found-image archive extensively. Gerhard Richter's encyclopaedic Atlas project or the photographic collections of Fischli and Weiss are clear examples of the artistic imperative to gather, filter and categorise pictures. Trying to develop taxonomies of images is like assembling a Thesaurus, where it is possible to cross-reference through every definition. Now it would seem that found images are all we have thanks to the Internet's primary function as consumer and diffuser of information, a generator of simulacra. Paradoxically, this infinite source seems to have more veracity due

The effect of target-flanker congruency in visual crowding with complex scenes

This item is only available electronically.In visual crowding, the presence of surrounding clutter impairs recognition of a peripherally presented target object. Crowding is thought to be the consequence of processes that inappropriately integrate information from neighbouring objects. For simple stimuli (e.g., orientation bars) that have single features (e.g., colour), random or ‘incongruent’ clutter can have an even greater effect on recognition when the surrounding items are similar to the target item. Less is known about how crowding affects recognition when the surrounding items share a natural and global similarity with the target. The current study investigated the extent to which recognition is enhanced when the surrounding clutter is ‘congruent’ with the category of the target. Two experiments were developed to test the effect of target-flanker congruency on visual crowding. Using a recognition task and a discrimination task, it was found that when a target painting or scene is surrounded by other images of the same artistic style or natural category, visual crowding can be markedly reduced (Experiment 1) or even eliminated (Experiment 2). Visual crowding is widely thought to place a fundamental limit on perception, but the results presented here demonstrate that visual context may not always be a detriment to recognition in peripheral vision.Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 201

Stroke Based Painterly Rendering

International audienceMany traditional art forms are produced by an artist sequentially placing a set of marks, such as brush strokes, on a canvas. Stroke based Rendering (SBR) is inspired by this process, and underpins many early and contemporary Artistic Stylization algorithms. This Chapter outlines the origins of SBR, and describes key algorithms for placement of brush strokes to create painterly renderings from source images. The chapter explores both local greedy, and global optimization based approaches to stroke placement. The issue of creative control in SBR is also briefly discussed

New media and impressionism

This master’s thesis is framed in the areas of New Media Art (NMA) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In particular, it is focused in the study of New Media Art pieces that share a set of characteristics (the most important one being that they are composed by atomic elements), might be explicitly interactive, and are usually exhibited in public settings or have been designed to be consumed by a large simultaneous audience. The content of the thesis can be divided in four big items: 1- The review of a certain set of NMA pieces, their characteristics, and some similarities hold between them and the impressionist movement that emerged at the second half of the 19th century, along with some visual perception principles of Gestalt psychology. 2- A selection and an adaptation of pre-existing theoretical frameworks for modelling interaction in public settings. These theoretical frameworks comprise a set of tools for describing, analysing, and designing New Media Art pieces. 3- The presentation of a set of selected artworks authored or coauthored by the author of this thesis. A description of their characteristics and technology will be presented. 4- The introduction of two tools for artistic production, which were instrumental for the construction of some of the artworks here presented: Sendero (an LED lighting system), and N.IMP (a tool for real time visual content generation)

Exploring Visual Short-Term Memory in Ensembles via Change Detection

This item is only available electronically.Detecting changes in our visual environment is fundamental to our everyday functioning, for example navigating safely in traffic. Change detection is often quick and precise, with people able to capture meaning of a scene in under a second. However, people can fail to detect significant visual changes when a disruption occurs between views (Simons & Ambinder, 2005). It remains unclear just how much the finer visual details matter for detecting change in scenes. To explore whether people are more sensitive to changes in the summary, or details in natural scenes, we explored short-term visual working memory by manipulating change-size across two change detection experiments. Participants (n = 30) were presented with arrays and its summarised image average for 150ms with a blank 300ms mask in between. Confidence ratings for participant certainty in the change occurring was also investigated. Contrary to predictions, participants were better at discriminating changes in the summary statistic averages than detailed arrays. However, performance increased with proportion of change size and confidence as predicted. It was concluded change size and image representation does affect change detection, and more visual detail is not always necessary to detecting change - spare representations are not so sparse after all.Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 201

Can Computers Create Art?

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.Comment: to appear in Arts, special issue on Machine as Artist (21st Century