Image sequence restoration by median filtering

Median filters are non-linear filters that fit in the generic category of order-statistic filters. Median filters are widely used for reducing random defects, commonly characterized by impulse or salt and pepper noise in a single image. Motion estimation is the process of estimating the displacement vector between like pixels in the current frame and the reference frame. When dealing with a motion sequence, the motion vectors are the key for operating on corresponding pixels in several frames. This work explores the use of various motion estimation algorithms in combination with various median filter algorithms to provide noise suppression. The results are compared using two sets of metrics: performance-based and objective image quality-based. These results are used to determine the best motion estimation / median filter combination for image sequence restoration. The primary goals of this work are to implement a motion estimation and median filter algorithm in hardware and develop and benchmark a flexible software alternative restoration process. There are two unique median filter algorithms to this work. The first filter is a modification to a single frame adaptive median filter. The modification applied motion compensation and temporal concepts. The other is an adaptive extension to the multi-level (ML3D) filter, called adaptive multi-level (AML3D) filter. The extension provides adaptable filter window sizes to the multiple filter sets that comprise the ML3D filter. The adaptive median filter is capable of filtering an image in 26.88 seconds per frame and results in a PSNR improvement of 5.452dB. The AML3D is capable of filtering an image in 14.73 seconds per frame and results in a PSNR improvement of 6.273dB. The AML3D is a suitable alternative to the other median filters

Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition

This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special issues/faper2020)

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Vibrating Existence: Early Cinema and Cognitive Creativity

This thesis collects together technical, historical and neurological evidence to examine how our perceptual and cognitive experience of cinema has changed diachronically and especially as a result of the transition from analogue to digital cinema projection. The slow arrival but sudden dominance of digital projection technology has provided a historic opportunity of renewed interest in the means by which cinema is created. This research attends to a particular aspect of the experience of cinema which has failed to survive the industry-wide changeover: the seemingly advantageous deletion of the shutter and its attendant flicker from the cinematic dispositif – the ‘flicks’ are literally no more. The transdisciplinary approach employs a combination of historical film technological research, especially focussed on the Early Cinema period (1895-1915), experimental media archaeology, and empirical electrophysiological study, to investigate the cognitive impact of historical (flickering) and modern day (effectively flickerless) cinema technology. The research uncovers the prominence of the relation of the mechanical and the perceptual in the early cinema period and thickens our understanding of its texts and contexts, ultimately adding a new dimension to the substantial existing body of work on early cinema. The argument of the thesis is situated particularly in the sector of film archives and museums (Film Heritage Institutes) where recent work has concentrated on transferring films of the analogue era to data files for display on an all-pervasive network of digital screens. However, while digitisation may preserve the content of these films it does not preserve the experience. These digital copies speak only to traditional film histories based on literary or auteurist ideas and do not communicate the visceral sensory impact on the late nineteenth century viewer. It is suggested that through reinstating the connectedness of the mechanical and perceptual our understanding of early cinema experience can be transformed. The research also has further implications for other forms of moving image exhibition such as the continuing use of analogue film in artistic practice

Women's Experimental Cinema

Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the terrain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde

Borderlines: Essays on Mapping and The Logic of Place

Borderlines innovatively explores the ways artistic interventions construct social, cultural, and mental spaces. The fifteen essays bring a broad multidisciplinary approach to the concept of borderlines and its markings through artistic manifestations. Rejecting older "normative"! understandings of the word border lines as signifying semantic irreversibility, this work gives prominence to the plasticity of the combined single word "borderlines." Borderlines is a collection of essays that address the cultural, artistic, conceptual, and performative mapping of places. The essays in this collection "write" borderlines from a wide variety of perspectives, representing diverse disciplines, cultural backgrounds, countries, and generations. It presents the pervasiveness of borderlines as an intellectual, artistic and political concept, across media, theories, and places. Borderlines is intended for academic specialists and students in cultural studies, theatre and performance, media and sound studies

Identity and form in alternative comics, 1967 – 2007

In the late 1960s, underground cartoonists established the comic book form as a space for the exploration of personal identity. “Alternative” comics grew out of this tradition as subsequent writers produced work independently of the major comics publishers, aimed at an adult audience and encompassing a broad range of visual styles and narrative content. Throughout the past forty years, British, US and Canadian writers and artists have used this medium to explore questions of selfhood and perception, often implicitly or overtly relating these issues to the form, history and conventions of the comic book itself. Two main threads run through this discussion of the representation of selfhood: childhood and memory on the one hand and sexuality and gender on the other. This thesis argues that for many creators there exists a useful analogy between the comic book form and mental processes, specifically between the fractured, verbal-visual blend of the comics page and the organisation of human memory. It further suggests that the historical association of comics first with childhood, and subsequently with male adolescence, has conditioned the representation of selfhood in adult comics. Comic book consumption has often centred on a community of predominantly young, white, male, socially marginal readers, buying and collecting serialised narratives. Comics creators’ awareness of this audience (either in response or resistance) has affected the content of their work. Although presented as a chronological narrative, this thesis is not a comprehensive history of Anglophone alternative comics, but centres on eight prominent authors/artists: Robert Crumb; Dave Sim; Lynda Barry; Julie Doucet; Alan Moore; the collaborative partnership of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean; and Chris Ware. Whilst spanning a wide range of genres and themes (autobiography, fantasy, gothic horror, parody, soap opera, the grotesque and others) each confronts and negotiates with conventions regarding the representation of selfhood