Fuzzy and non-fuzzy approaches for digital image classification

This paper classifies different digital images using two types of clustering algorithms. The first type is the fuzzy clustering methods, while the second type considers the non-fuzzy methods. For the performance comparisons, we apply four clustering algorithms with two from the fuzzy type and the other two from the non-fuzzy (partitonal) clustering type. The automatic partitional clustering algorithm and the partitional k-means algorithm are chosen as the two examples of the non-fuzzy clustering techniques, while the automatic fuzzy algorithm and the fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm are taken as the examples of the fuzzy clustering techniques. The evaluation among the four algorithms are done by implementing these algorithms to three different types of image databases, based on the comparison criteria of: dataset size, cluster number, execution time and classification accuracy and k-cross validation. The experimental results demonstrate that the non-fuzzy algorithms have higher accuracies in compared to the fuzzy algorithms, especially when dealing with large data sizes and different types of images. Three types of image databases of human face images, handwritten digits and natural scenes are used for the performance evaluation

Attention Based Auto Image Cropping

Many images contain salient regions that are surrounded by too much uninteresting background material and are not as enlightening as a sensibly cropped version. The choice of the best picture window both at capture time and during subsequent processing is normally subjective and a wholly manual task. This paper proposes a method of automatically cropping visual material based upon a new measure of visual attention that reflects the informativeness of the image

From Painting to Pixels: Expansionist Topoi in American Visual Culture

Digital representations of the mythic West abound, from Rockstar Games’ popular open-world Western, Red Dead Redemption, to free iPad and iPhone apps (Oregon Settler, Trade Nations Frontier). These virtual re-enactments use twenty-first century technologies to reinforce broader dominant-cultural narratives celebrating the twinned colonization of indigenous land and bodies, yet their roots lie in far older aesthetic and discursive conventions: those found within nineteenth-century landscape and frontier paintings. This project traces the evolution of frontier imagery from the nineteenth century to the digital age and uses Aristotelian topics theory to evaluate recurring images’ discursive impact over time in a Western context. Nineteenth-century landscape artists generated a number of recurring visual topo which persist to this day. Among the most prominent are the “empty” prairie or rugged Western landscape, waiting to be filled with white settlements, and the vanishing or dying "Indian," whose demise paves the way for the land’s new inhabitants. My project articulates the rhetorical dimensions of these images and demonstrates the ongoing role of both visual and digital culture in shaping U.S. public opinion concerning Western land use and Native American tribal sovereignty. It also analyzes the additional rhetorical power and complexity such images hold when they make the leap from static media (paintings, illustrations, sculptures) to more interactive formats. Because participatory media such as video games allow for multisensory engagement – tapping users’ aural and kinesthetic faculties alongside visual faculties – their multiple sensory appeals enhance rhetoricity at the same time they blur the lines dividing rhetor and audience in traditional Western understandings of rhetoric

The Land Experiments in Colour Vision - Colour as a Physical, Phenomenological and Synthetic Object

This thesis analyses the historical and intellectual context of Edwin Land’s experiments in colour vision. I argue that the colour vision research program and retinex theory developed by Land and his colleagues provided a satisfying synthesis of two divergent schools in the history of colour science. The first chapter of this thesis establishes the existence of the “physical” school of colour science. The defining feature of this school was the belief in the colour atomism hypothesis. This is the idea that the colour perceived at a point in the visual field is completely determined by the physical properties of the light rays entering the retina at that point. In other words, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the physical properties of light rays and colour sensation at a point in the visual field. The second chapter establishes the existence of the “phenomenological” school of colour science. The defining feature of this school was the discovery of colour phenomena which could not be accounted for by the colour atomism hypothesis. Among these phenomena were “coloured shadows”, “simultaneous colour contrast”, and “colour constancy”. The third chapter shows how Land’s colour vision research program and retinex theory reconciled these two schools. Land and his colleagues demonstrated that the colour atomism hypothesis is a special case, valid only for points of light. The colour phenomena studied by the “phenomenological” school could be predicted by a computational model – retinex theory – which accounted for colour as it is perceived over a wide visual field, rather than simply at single points. In this process, Land and colleagues built up a new understanding of colour vision as a practical utility evolved for the organism, designed to achieve colour constancy

REAL TIME ASSISTANCE IN PHOTOGRAPHY USING SOCIAL MEDIA

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

"The whole world in a book" : fact, fiction and the postmodern in Selected Works by E. L. Doctorow

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-143).This dissertation considers the manner in which the thematic and stylistic interests displayed in E. L. Doctorow's fiction derive from the postmodern context in which he works. Encapsulating the spirit of subversion so typical of postmodernism, Doctorow not only questions established modes of perception, but reinvigorates cultural and social traditions through the reformulation of customarily unchallenged norms and values. Departing from the conventions of traditional narrative, he emphasises the need for a continual critical interrogation and revision of absolutist grand narratives in order to achieve a more complex understanding of human experience. He grapples with concepts relating to the fluidity of meaning and the constructed nature of texts, deftly experimenting with narrative form in order to destabilise conventional perceptions of history, reality and representation

Violent urban disturbance in England 1980-81

This study addresses violent urban disturbances which occurred in England in the early 1980s with particular reference to the Bristol ‘riots’ of April 1980 and the numerous disorders which followed in July 1981. Revisiting two concepts traditionally utilised to explain the spread of collective violence, namely ‘diffusion’ and ‘contagion,’ it argues that the latter offers a more useful model for understanding the above-mentioned events. Diffusion used in this context implies that such disturbances are independent of each other and occur randomly. It is associated with the concept of ‘copycat riots’, which were commonly invoked by the national media as a way of explaining the spread of urban disturbances in July 1981. Contagion by contrast holds that urban disturbances are related to one another and involve a variety of communication processes and rational collective decision-making. This implies that such events can only be fully understood if they are studied in terms of their local dynamics.Providing the first comprehensive macro-historical analysis of the disturbances of July 1981, this thesis utilises a range of quantitative techniques to argue that the temporal and spatial spread of the unrest exhibited patterns of contagion. These mini-waves of disorder located in several conurbations were precipitated by major disturbances in inner-city multi-ethnic areas. This contradicts more conventional explanations which credit the national media as the sole driver of riotous behaviour.The thesis then proceeds to offer a micro analysis of disturbances in Bristol in April 1980, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Exploiting previously unexplored primary sources and recently collected oral histories from participants, it establishes detailed narratives of three related disturbances in the city. The anatomy of the individual incidents and local contagious effects are examined using spatial mapping, social network and ethnographic analyses. The results suggest that previously ignored educational, sub-cultural and ethnographic intra- and inter-community linkages were important factors in the spread of the disorders in Bristol.The case studies of the Bristol disorders are then used to illuminate our understanding of the processes at work during the July 1981 disturbances. It is argued that the latter events were essentially characterised by anti-police and anti-racist collective violence, which marked a momentary recomposition of working-class youth across ethnic divides

The aesthetic of empiricism: self, knowledge and reality in Mid-Victorian prose

Long ago, in Keywords, Raymond Williams remarked with some justification that "Empirical and the related empiricism are now in some contexts among the most difficult words in the language." That difficulty has yet to be fully recognised or elaborated by contemporary criticism. In an era when discontinuity, difference and heterogeneity have become privileged tenets of criticism, empiricism has come to be regarded as the other of contemporary thought and synonymous with positivism or objectivism. Yet empiricism has rarely, if ever, had this philosophical implication; Dr Johnson, we recall, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of commonsense. Focusing on the mid-nineteenth century, this thesis argues that far from initiating a crude representationalism, empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation. That instability stemmed from the dominant view that the self was constructed in and through experience, and perforce restlessly alterable or unfinished, while also being central to the methodology of observation underlying the empiricists' view of the world. The contingent self was conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. In the work of John Ruskin, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer the principle of relationality consistently shapes their view of reality and their epistemological drive. By considering a variety of their writing—philosophical, literary, psychological, scientific, critical—it will be argued that 'empiricism' provides a useful rubric for their common, primary, deep-seated epistemological impulse. In various self-conscious ways, their arguments unfold in destabilising narrative forms, dramatising the principles of limitation and provisionality so crucial to their meaning. Rather like the reality they attempt to describe, works like Bain's The Senses and the Intellect (1855) or Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-9) adopt a sprawling, proliferating structure which seems to register a restless struggle to unify knowledge, and by dramatising this resistance to the synthesising will they acknowledge in and through narrative itself the impossibility of some perfect (and therefore fixed) organisation. The many volumes and reworked editions in which mid-Victorian empiricism appeared provide formidable material evidence of this revisability principle, incorporating the theme of multiplicity at a narrative level. Novels like Middlemarch (1871-2), to take a famous example, not only make connective structures (networks, webs, tangles) a way of describing the morphology of communal life, they assimilate this logic of association into their narrative method. In all cases, associational possibility becomes encoded in form. After historically retracing these questions to the figure of David Hume, subsequent chapters explore different aspects of narrative and knowledge in these writers: the aesthetic of realism, the problems of perception, the knowing body, and the negotiation of relativism. To the extent that this relational epistemology shapes these works—whether multi-volume treatises, novels or periodical essays—it might be thought of as determining the aesthetic of empiricism

Living in virtual communities : an ethnography of life online

This thesis examines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People 'live in' and 'construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, I combine original ethnographic research in Cybertown (http: /www. cybertown. com), a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Secondly I suggest that people in Cybertown are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. By extending traditional human relationships into Cybertown, they are widening their webs of relationships, not weakening them. Human relationships in cyberspace are formed and maintained in similar ways to those in wider society. Rather than being exotic and removed from real life, they are actually being assimilated into everyday life. Furthermore they are often moved into other social settings, just as they are in offline life