A possibly Christian burial of the late Roman period discovered in a quarry at Ta' Sannat, Gozo

According to the Museum Annual Report for the years 1928-9, the Police Occurrences Register for the period 20/12/1928- 9/4/1929, and Public Works correspondence for the period 5/9/1928 - 3/4/1929, a burial was discovered in a quarry at Ta' Sannat on 7th January 1929. The report of the discovery was initially received by Mr Edward Borg Cardona, the District Engineer Public Works Department (Gozo). Together with Supt. E. Galea, he immediately visited the site and gave instructions to halt works and for the site to also submitted to the Director of Museums. The burial yielded a small jar, an oenochoe (wine-jug), and a red clay lamp close to a heap of human bones. This is probably what was seen by Prof. Terni Zammit, the Archaeology section curator, when six days later (on 13th January), accompanied by Mr Edward Borg Cardona, he examined the site and the finds that had been lifted from the tomb.peer-reviewe

Religious identity and perceptions of afterlife gleaned from a funerary monument to a young girl from (late) Roman Melite

Possibly late during the Roman occupation of Malta, a young deceased girl had a funerary monument set up in her memory by her loving mother. Analysis of both epigraphic content and iconographic elements on this monument would show that the mother; at least, is likely to have been originally a public slave but later achieved manumission, a status which remained to be enjoyed by herself and by her daughter. Moreover, they seem to have adhered to the then commonly held beliefs regarding the nature of death and afterlife. Yet, identifying their beliefs on the nature of death and afterlife did not prove sufficient to determine their religious identity as such beliefs were evidently shared by different religious groups.peer-reviewe

Cremation burials in early Bronze Age Malta : evidence from Tarxien and Ggantija

A common way of disposing of the dead across the entire Mediterranean (and even beyond) from prehistoric down to late Roman times was to bury the corpse - or the burnt remains, if cremated - in a built chamber or in a floor cavity and then cover it up under a mound of stones and/or earth, usually encircled by a kerb or retaining stone wall. Sizes varied and larger ones might even have a passage providing access to the burial chamber. In many cases, these burial mounds or tumuli used to be circular, having an overall appearance of a cone, hut, or hill. It is worth investigating whether the resemblance of burial mounds to huts was intentional or merely accidental (something which I do not intend to do in this contribution). If it was intentional, was it meant to convey an idea of the tomb as a house of the dead? In this contribution, I shall be dealing with cremation burials on the Maltese islands in the early Bronze Age (Tarxien Cemetery phase: 2400-1500 B.C.), focusing, towards the end, on a type of clay figurine associated - as yet, exclusively - with this early Bronze Age practice. Some new interpretations are attempted in respect of both the burials themselves as well as the mentioned figurines. To this end, I shall be resorting to evidence from two temple sites: those at Tarxien and Ggantija, with the richer corpus of evidence coming from the former. To begin with, I derive insights for my interpretations by initially resorting to the earliest literary evidence we have and which concerns the Aegean region where it comes from. But I also draw on comparisons with some other sites and/or materials outside the Maltese islands. It is mainly this comparative approach that, for the greater part, provides the backbone of my arguments.peer-reviewe

Trainable COSFIRE filters for vessel delineation with application to retinal images

Retinal imaging provides a non-invasive opportunity for the diagnosis of several medical pathologies. The automatic segmentation of the vessel tree is an important pre-processing step which facilitates subsequent automatic processes that contribute to such diagnosis. We introduce a novel method for the automatic segmentation of vessel trees in retinal fundus images. We propose a filter that selectively responds to vessels and that we call B-COSFIRE with B standing for bar which is an abstraction for a vessel. It is based on the existing COSFIRE (Combination Of Shifted Filter Responses) approach. A B-COSFIRE filter achieves orientation selectivity by computing the weighted geometric mean of the output of a pool of Difference-of-Gaussians filters, whose supports are aligned in a collinear manner. It achieves rotation invariance efficiently by simple shifting operations. The proposed filter is versatile as its selectivity is determined from any given vessel-like prototype pattern in an automatic configuration process. We configure two B-COSFIRE filters, namely symmetric and asymmetric, that are selective for bars and bar-endings, respectively. We achieve vessel segmentation by summing up the responses of the two rotation-invariant B-COSFIRE filters followed by thresholding. The results that we achieve on three publicly available data sets (DRIVE: Se = 0.7655, Sp = 0.9704; STARE: Se = 0.7716, Sp = 0.9701; CHASE_DB1: Se = 0.7585, Sp = 0.9587) are higher than many of the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed segmentation approach is also very efficient with a time complexity that is significantly lower than existing methods.peer-reviewe

Ventral-stream-like shape representation : from pixel intensity values to trainable object-selective COSFIRE models

Keywords: hierarchical representation, object recognition, shape, ventral stream, vision and scene understanding, robotics, handwriting analysisThe remarkable abilities of the primate visual system have inspired the construction of computational models of some visual neurons. We propose a trainable hierarchical object recognition model, which we call S-COSFIRE (S stands for Shape and COSFIRE stands for Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses) and use it to localize and recognize objects of interests embedded in complex scenes. It is inspired by the visual processing in the ventral stream (V1/V2 → V4 → TEO). Recognition and localization of objects embedded in complex scenes is important for many computer vision applications. Most existing methods require prior segmentation of the objects from the background which on its turn requires recognition. An S-COSFIRE filter is automatically configured to be selective for an arrangement of contour-based features that belong to a prototype shape specified by an example. The configuration comprises selecting relevant vertex detectors and determining certain blur and shift parameters. The response is computed as the weighted geometric mean of the blurred and shifted responses of the selected vertex detectors. S-COSFIRE filters share similar properties with some neurons in inferotemporal cortex, which provided inspiration for this work. We demonstrate the effectiveness of S-COSFIRE filters in two applications: letter and keyword spotting in handwritten manuscripts and object spotting in complex scenes for the computer vision system of a domestic robot. S-COSFIRE filters are effective to recognize and localize (deformable) objects in images of complex scenes without requiring prior segmentation. They are versatile trainable shape detectors, conceptually simple and easy to implement. The presented hierarchical shape representation contributes to a better understanding of the brain and to more robust computer vision algorithms.peer-reviewe

Religious Landscapes and Identities of the Maltese Islands in a Mediterranean Context: 700 B.C. - A.D. 500

Abstract Maltese religious practices in Classical antiquity are an area of research that has been neglected by scholars, particularly in recent years, in contrast to religious practices of the prehistoric periods. This has created a lacuna in Maltese archaeology that this thesis seeks to address. In doing so, the approach adopted in this thesis diverges from earlier accounts based largely on artefacts and sites divorced from their associated landscape. Instead, the approach pursued here focuses on the landscape context of religious practices of the Maltese islands. An important contribution of this thesis is the deliberately broad definition of religious phenomena in the Maltese islands to include aspects of private religion and rural religious contexts. This aim is achieved through a multidisciplinary, comparative, and interpretative approach that is widely adopted throughout the core of the thesis comprising five integrated case studies. To facilitate a better understanding and interpretation of the religious phenomenon in the Maltese islands, the thesis evaluates the case studies within the religious context of the wider Mediterranean region. Aided by syntheses and analyses of the data, this study examines ‘sacralised’ landscapes often re-worked to accommodate hybrid cults. It also identifies the religious identity(ies) of the Maltese communities as they are shaped by their different concerns or motives and as they manifest themselves in urban and in rural contexts, defines the nature of their religious practices, and establishes their character vis-à-vis other Mediterranean religious cultures. Relying on a wider set of data sources and adopting a more holistic approach, the thesis builds up a comprehensive picture of ancient Maltese religious culture and identity that, while reflecting the religious scenario of the wider Mediterranean region, was characteristically Maltese in a hybridised form. The thesis, therefore, provides a case study that may contribute towards knowledge on religious cultures and identities in the Mediterranean in general and amongst island communities in particular

Visual response inhibition for increased robustness of convolutional networks to distribution shifts

Convolutional neural networks have been shown to suffer from distribution shifts in the test data, for instance caused by the so called common corruptions and perturbations. Test images can contain noise, digital transformations, and blur that were not present in the training data, negatively impacting the performance of trained models. Humans experience much stronger robustness to noise and visual distortions than deep networks. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of a neuronal response inhibition mechanism, called push-pull, observed in the early part of the visual system, to increase the robustness of deep convolutional networks. We deploy a Push-Pull inhibition layer as a replacement of the initial convolutional layers (input layer and in the first block of residual and dense architectures) of standard convolutional networks for image classification. We show that the PushPull inhibition component increases the robustness of standard networks for image classification to distribution shifts on the CIFAR10-C and CIFAR10-P test sets