“Ché la diritta via era smarrita”: Dante’s Commedia in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing

La voix narratrice qui s'engage dans la construction des Textes pour rien de Samuel Beckett, commence un récit qu'elle abandonne, reprend et abandonne de nouveau, emportée par la colère, le désespoir ou la lassitude. Ce processus de recommencement est truffé de références à la théologie poétique de la Divine Comédie de Dante. Le présent article compare le grand pouvoir qu'ont les histoires de Dante à évoquer la réalité, au statut d'évocation inférieur des histoires de Beckett. Cela pour montrer l'attachement nostalgique de Beckett à l'idée que la langue peut engendrer le réel sans pour autant y croire

Feature fusion for facial landmark detection: A feature descriptors combination approach

Facial landmark detection is a crucial first step in facial analysis for biometrics and numerous other applications. However, it has proved to be a very challenging task due to the numerous sources of variation in 2D and 3D facial data. Although landmark detection based on descriptors of the 2D and 3D appearance of the face has been extensively studied, the fusion of such feature descriptors is a relatively under-studied issue. In this report, a novel generalized framework for combining facial feature descriptors is presented, and several feature fusion schemes are proposed and evaluated. The proposed framework maps each feature into a similarity score, combines the individual similarity scores into a resultant score, used to select the optimal solution for a queried landmark. The evaluation of the proposed fusion schemes for facial landmark detection clearly indicates that a quadratic distance to similarity mapping in conjunction with a root mean square rule for similarity fusion achieves the best performance in accuracy, efficiency, robustness and monotonicity

Birthing pains: How cyborgs refigure medical bodies, technologies, and objectives

Cyborgs are polymorphic and not yet visibly different from humans in part because cyborgic technologies have just been developed, in part because we are not trained to see how the post human arises. The birth of cyborgs alters the core of medicine from disease-containment and death-assessment to enhancement of function and image, to transgression of previous natural bounds as established by the possibility of space and oceanic travel. Cyborgs, as postmodern/ posthuman products of medicine, make visible the current shift in the construction of medical bodies, technologies, and objectives. Medical bodies have been determined by a conception of patienthood or diseased body. The connection of body and disease as distinct species happened in the medical enclosure: the hospital-clinic, during mid-late 19th century. In the hospital-clinic, the medical body has been clearly mapped in terms of disease identity or malfunction, and it has encountered medical technologies used to aid in diagnosis. The patient-doctor relationship has shifted because of the revolution in instrumentation at the turn of the century. Another shift can be discerned, as it is again mirrored in the relations of doctor-patient, as it has been re-structured through cyberspace and expert systems. Clearly, the revolution or scientification of medicine has been fueled by the tuberculosis crisis as it challenged medical and political institutions. A similar crisis has occurred with AIDS: is cyborg-technology the fulfillment of the modem dream of immortality and total control in the face of the epidemic? An easy answer to such question cannot be produced. Cyborgs are a product of the meeting of natural and human sciences through cybernetics. Their existence and proliferation destabilize assumptions at the philosophical foundations of knowledge and medicine as well as our conceptions of identity and rights, through an unsettling of the connection between community-individuality, of the distinction between private and public domains

Looking Beyond Appearances: Synthetic Training Data for Deep CNNs in Re-identification

Re-identification is generally carried out by encoding the appearance of a subject in terms of outfit, suggesting scenarios where people do not change their attire. In this paper we overcome this restriction, by proposing a framework based on a deep convolutional neural network, SOMAnet, that additionally models other discriminative aspects, namely, structural attributes of the human figure (e.g. height, obesity, gender). Our method is unique in many respects. First, SOMAnet is based on the Inception architecture, departing from the usual siamese framework. This spares expensive data preparation (pairing images across cameras) and allows the understanding of what the network learned. Second, and most notably, the training data consists of a synthetic 100K instance dataset, SOMAset, created by photorealistic human body generation software. Synthetic data represents a good compromise between realistic imagery, usually not required in re-identification since surveillance cameras capture low-resolution silhouettes, and complete control of the samples, which is useful in order to customize the data w.r.t. the surveillance scenario at-hand, e.g. ethnicity. SOMAnet, trained on SOMAset and fine-tuned on recent re-identification benchmarks, outperforms all competitors, matching subjects even with different apparel. The combination of synthetic data with Inception architectures opens up new research avenues in re-identification.Comment: 14 page

Partial 3D Object Retrieval using Local Binary QUICCI Descriptors and Dissimilarity Tree Indexing

A complete pipeline is presented for accurate and efficient partial 3D object retrieval based on Quick Intersection Count Change Image (QUICCI) binary local descriptors and a novel indexing tree. It is shown how a modification to the QUICCI query descriptor makes it ideal for partial retrieval. An indexing structure called Dissimilarity Tree is proposed which can significantly accelerate searching the large space of local descriptors; this is applicable to QUICCI and other binary descriptors. The index exploits the distribution of bits within descriptors for efficient retrieval. The retrieval pipeline is tested on the artificial part of SHREC'16 dataset with near-ideal retrieval results.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures, to be published in Computers & Graphic

Radial Intersection Count Image: a Clutter Resistant 3D Shape Descriptor

A novel shape descriptor for cluttered scenes is presented, the Radial Intersection Count Image (RICI), and is shown to significantly outperform the classic Spin Image (SI) and 3D Shape Context (3DSC) in both uncluttered and, more significantly, cluttered scenes. It is also faster to compute and compare. The clutter resistance of the RICI is mainly due to the design of a novel distance function, capable of disregarding clutter to a great extent. As opposed to the SI and 3DSC, which both count point samples, the RICI uses intersection counts with the mesh surface, and is therefore noise-free. For efficient RICI construction, novel algorithms of general interest were developed. These include an efficient circle-triangle intersection algorithm and an algorithm for projecting a point into SI-like ($\alpha$, $\beta$) coordinates. The 'clutterbox experiment' is also introduced as a better way of evaluating descriptors' response to clutter. The SI, 3DSC, and RICI are evaluated in this framework and the advantage of the RICI is clearly demonstrated.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, to be published in Computers & Graphic

An Indexing Scheme and Descriptor for 3D Object Retrieval Based on Local Shape Querying

A binary descriptor indexing scheme based on Hamming distance called the Hamming tree for local shape queries is presented. A new binary clutter resistant descriptor named Quick Intersection Count Change Image (QUICCI) is also introduced. This local shape descriptor is extremely small and fast to compare. Additionally, a novel distance function called Weighted Hamming applicable to QUICCI images is proposed for retrieval applications. The effectiveness of the indexing scheme and QUICCI is demonstrated on 828 million QUICCI images derived from the SHREC2017 dataset, while the clutter resistance of QUICCI is shown using the clutterbox experiment.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, to be published in a Special Issue in Computers & Graphic

The kindness of strangers : savage rescue in Tennessee Williams' The roman spring of mrs. Stone

Dans la longue nouvelle "Le Printemps romain de Mrs Stone", Williams présente l'éveil tardif à la vie d'une actrice américaine qui vit loin de chez elle. A travers des stratégies narratives qui engagent l'ambiguïté, des modes de construction de personnages fondés sur le paradoxe, l'auteur fait traverser à son héroïne deux amours sacrificielles : en passant d'un ami entretenu attitré à un jeune garçon qui se prostitue dans la rue, Mrs Stone laisse derrière elle les conventions d'une vie élégamment décadente pour pénétrer dans le violent univers du paganisme que le titre de la nouvelle semble suggérer. Sa délivrance est, certes, crue, teintée de barbarie. Cette lecture psychanalytique de l'identité sexuelle du personnage est fondée sur la conception classique de la représentation du désir

The kindness of strangers : savage rescue in Tennessee Williams' The roman spring of mrs. Stone

Dans la longue nouvelle "Le Printemps romain de Mrs Stone", Williams présente l'éveil tardif à la vie d'une actrice américaine qui vit loin de chez elle. A travers des stratégies narratives qui engagent l'ambiguïté, des modes de construction de personnages fondés sur le paradoxe, l'auteur fait traverser à son héroïne deux amours sacrificielles : en passant d'un ami entretenu attitré à un jeune garçon qui se prostitue dans la rue, Mrs Stone laisse derrière elle les conventions d'une vie élégamment décadente pour pénétrer dans le violent univers du paganisme que le titre de la nouvelle semble suggérer. Sa délivrance est, certes, crue, teintée de barbarie. Cette lecture psychanalytique de l'identité sexuelle du personnage est fondée sur la conception classique de la représentation du désir