« Contre tous les youpins du monde » : la ville de Québec au temps de l’antisémitisme (1890–1914)

In 1912, Charles Maurras mentioned in the Parisian publication l’Action française “the importance of anti-Semitism in Quebec City.” A city founded on a strong ethno-linguistic duality, Quebec City’s character changed considerably at the turn of the 20th century. Industrialization, immigration, the predominant conception of the nation-state and the magisterium of the Church upset a city that seemed to be experiencing a difficult transition. Ridden with anxiety, a certain elite is attacking a vulnerable minority on a daily basis. Thus a noisy anti-Semitism takes shape, regularly feeding a chimerical representation of the Jew which, by the effect of imbalance between reality and the imaginary, between truth and lies, generates nocuous tensions.En 1912, Charles Maurras mentionne dans l’Action française de Paris « l’importance de l’antisémitisme à Québec ». Ville fondée sur une forte dualité ethno-linguistique, Québec voit au tournant du XXe siècle son visage changer considérablement. L’industrialisation, l’immigration, la conception prédominante de l’État nation et le Magistère de l’Église bousculent une Cité qui paraît mal vivre la transition. Rongée par l’angoisse, une certaine élite s’en prend alors quotidiennement à une minorité vulnérable. Ainsi prend forme un antisémitisme tapageur nourrissant régulièrement une représentation chimérique du Juif et qui, par effet de déséquilibre entre la réalité et l’imaginaire, entre le vrai et le leurre, génère de funestes tensions

Automatic handwriter identification using advanced machine learning

Handwriter identification a challenging problem especially for forensic investigation. This topic has received significant attention from the research community and several handwriter identification systems were developed for various applications including forensic science, document analysis and investigation of the historical documents. This work is part of an investigation to develop new tools and methods for Arabic palaeography, which is is the study of handwritten material, particularly ancient manuscripts with missing writers, dates, and/or places. In particular, the main aim of this research project is to investigate and develop new techniques and algorithms for the classification and analysis of ancient handwritten documents to support palaeographic studies. Three contributions were proposed in this research. The first is concerned with the development of a text line extraction algorithm on colour and greyscale historical manuscripts. The idea uses a modified bilateral filtering approach to adaptively smooth the images while still preserving the edges through a nonlinear combination of neighboring image values. The proposed algorithm aims to compute a median and a separating seam and has been validated to deal with both greyscale and colour historical documents using different datasets. The results obtained suggest that our proposed technique yields attractive results when compared against a few similar algorithms. The second contribution proposes to deploy a combination of Oriented Basic Image features and the concept of graphemes codebook in order to improve the recognition performances. The proposed algorithm is capable to effectively extract the most distinguishing handwriter’s patterns. The idea consists of judiciously combining a multiscale feature extraction with the concept of grapheme to allow for the extraction of several discriminating features such as handwriting curvature, direction, wrinkliness and various edge-based features. The technique was validated for identifying handwriters using both Arabic and English writings captured as scanned images using the IAM dataset for English handwriting and ICFHR 2012 dataset for Arabic handwriting. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared against some similar techniques. The third contribution is concerned with an offline handwriter identification approach based on the convolutional neural network technology. At the first stage, the Alex-Net architecture was employed to learn image features (handwritten scripts) and the features obtained from the fully connected layers of the model. Then, a Support vector machine classifier is deployed to classify the writing styles of the various handwriters. In this way, the test scripts can be classified by the CNN training model for further classification. The proposed approach was evaluated based on Arabic Historical datasets; Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) and Qatar National Library (QNL). The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed model achieved superior performances when compared to some similar method

Résolution du problème de la stéréophotométrie non calibrée par estimation de l'intensité des éclairages

Nous présentons une nouvelle méthode de résolution du problème de la stéréophotométrie non calibrée dans le cadre lambertien, fondée sur l'hypothèse que tous les éclairages ont la même intensité, couplée à l'estimation de cette intensité. Nous montrons comment cette hypothèse permet de lever les ambiguïtés inhérentes à la linéarité du modèle lambertien, et notamment de résoudre l'ambiguïté de bas- relief. Le problème devenant alors bien posé, nous proposons une méthode complète pour résoudre le problème de la stéréophotométrie non calibrée et ainsi estimer conjoin- tement les conditions d'éclairage et le champ de normales. Nous validons notre méthode par la reconstruction 3D de visages à partir d'images réelles, et nous comparons son efficacité et sa précision aux techniques les plus récentes de la littérature

Integration of a Normal Field without Boundary Condition

ISBN 2-7261-1297 8International audienceWe show how to use two existing methods of integration of a normal eld in the absence of boundary condition, which makes them more realistic. Moreover, we show how perspective can be taken into account, in order to render the 3D-reconstruction more accurate. Finally, the joint use of both these methods of integration allows us to obtain very satisfactory results, from the point of view of CPU time as well as that of the accuracy of the reconstructions. As an application, we use this new combined method of integration of a normal eld in the framework of photometric stereo, a technique which aims at computing a normal field to the surface of a scene from several images of this scene illuminated from various directions. The performances of the proposed method are illustrated on synthetic, as well as on real image

Intégration d'un champ de gradient rapide et robuste aux discontinuités - Application à la stéréophotométrie

National audienceNous proposons plusieurs nouvelles méthodes permettant de résoudre le problème de la reconstruction 3D d’une surface à partir de son gradient, qui soient rapides et robustes aux discontinuités de profondeur. Nous proposons de rem-placer les moindres carrés par une fonctionnelle inspirée de la méthode de restauration de Perona et Malik, et montrons comment les méthodes d’intégration existantes les plus rapides peuvent être adaptées à la minimisation de cette fonctionnelle

Edge-Preserving Integration of a Normal Field: Weighted Least Squares and L1 Approaches

International audienceWe introduce several new functionals, inspired from variational image denoising models, for recovering a piecewise-smooth surface from a dense estimation of its normal field. In the weighted least-squares approach, the non-differentiable elements of the surface are a priori detected so as to weight the least-squares model. To avoid this detection step, we introduce reweighted least-squares for minimising an isotropic TV-like functional, and split-Bregman iterations for L1 minimisation

Shape-from-shading for Surfaces Applicable to Planes

ISBN 2-7261-1297 8International audienceUnder the classical assumptions of shape-from-shading, we show that the image of any applicable surface (surface applicable to a plane) is also the image of a 1- dimensional manifold of applicable surfaces, provided the image contains no singular point. Moreover, we show that the knowledge of a normal in the image sufces to reconstruct the whole shape of the surface, since the problem can be reformulated as an ordinary differential equation w.r.t. the normal, in this case. The usefulness of this theoretical result to document image analysis is straightforward

Résolution de la stéréophotométrie par apprentissage

Session "Posters"National audienceNous montrons dans cet article comment résoudre la stéréophotométrie par apprentissage. L'idée de base consiste à insérer une sphère dans la scène dont on souhaite retrouver le relief, et à recouvrir la sphère et la scène d'une même peinture. Les images de la sphère servant de données d'apprentissage, il n'est pas nécessaire de connaître la réflectance de la scène pour mettre en oeuvre la stéréophotométrie. De plus, les ombres propres sont considérées comme des données utiles. Nous montrons que l'analyse en composantes principales (ACP) permet, d'une part, d'obtenir les mêmes résultats que Hertzmann et al. tout en réduisant le temps de calcul, et d'autre part, de détecter les ombres portées de la scène, pour peu que la sphère en soit dépourvue. Nous montrons aussi comment généraliser notre approche à des scènes non préalablement peintes, mais de nature photométrique uniforme. Toutes ces contributions sont validées sur images de synthèse et images réelle