Myth on Modern American Stage: The Case of Tennessee Williams’ Plays

The present paper examines the use of myth in modern American drama mainly in a sample of American playwright Tennessee Williams’ plays in accordance with the usual nature of studies on Greek classical tradition. The main focus will be on the relationship between myth and literature. We shall attempt to show how Tennessee Williams, in search of a modern myth, returns to the ancient sources of drama by adopting some Greek and other myths in his effort to confront the crisis of modern civilization and to resolve the dilemmas of twentieth century man. The task is to demonstrate that the ritual legends of the ancient peoples can be considered Williams’ prime source of inspiration for the portrayal of man’s metamorphosis in modern America

Insight in the brain:a multimodal approach investigating insight in individuals with a psychotic disorder and healthy individuals

Insight is impaired in the majority of patients with schizophrenia. This group of patients – more or less – does not consider themselves to be ill and does not recognize the need for treatment. The negative outcomes are immense: they have more problems sticking to medication, a lower quality of life and poorer outcome in general, compared to patients with good insight. Studies in this dissertation showed that abnormalities of numerous brain regions across the brain are associated with impaired insight. This suggests that to have good insight, several complex brain functions have to work unimpededly. That requires orchestrated communication of numerous brain regions across the brain. We also investigated an ability that might be important for having insight, namely self-reflectiveness. Our findings show that brain networks of individuals with lower self-reflectiveness abilities are less stable with regard to brain function and structure. On the other hand, one network was overly present in individuals with lower self-reflectiveness. This is a network that is activated when an individual is not engaged in a task, and that has been shown to be involved in mind wandering. The results of this thesis are important for guiding future treatments of impaired insight such as: 1) strengthening networks that are important for insight, or 2) diminishing function of mind wandering networks. The first could be achieved with the incorporation of several aspects of therapies into treatment that aim to improve neurocognitive, social cognitive and metacognitive functions, while the latter could be achieved with mindfulness meditation training

Special Section Guest Editorial: Image/Video Quality and System Performance

Rapid developments in display technologies, digital printing, imaging sensors, image processing and image transmission are providing new possibilities for creating and conveying visual content. In an age in which images and video are ubiquitous and where mobile, satellite, and three-dimensional (3-D) imaging have become ordinary experiences, quantification of the performance of modern imaging systems requires appropriate approaches. At the end of the imaging chain, a human observer must decide whether images and video are of a satisfactory visual quality. Hence the measurement and modeling of perceived image quality is of crucial importance, not only in visual arts and commercial applications but also in scientific and entertainment environments. Advances in our understanding of the human visual system offer new possibilities for creating visually superior imaging systems and promise more accurate modeling of image quality. As a result, there is a profusion of new research on imaging performance and perceived quality

Evaluation of a Hyperspectral Image Database for Demosaicking Purposes

International audienceWe present a study on the the applicability of hyperspectral images to evaluate color filter array (CFA) design and the performance of demosaicking algorithms. The aim is to simulate a typical digital still camera processing pipe-line and to compare two different scenarios: evaluate the performance of demosaicking algorithms applied to raw camera RGB values before color rendering to sRGB, and evaluate the performance of demosaicking algorithms applied on the final sRGB color rendered image. The second scenario is the most frequently used one in literature because CFA design and algorithms are usually tested on a set of existing images that are already rendered, such as the Kodak Photo CD set containing the well-known lighthouse image. We simulate the camera processing pipe-line with measured spectral sensitivity functions of a real camera. Modeling a Bayer CFA, we select three linear demosaicking techniques in order to perform the tests. The evaluation is done using CMSE, CPSNR, s-CIELAB and MSSIM metrics to compare demosaicking results. We find that the performance, and especially the difference between demosaicking algorithms, is indeed significant depending if the mosaicking/demosaicking is applied to camera raw values as opposed to already rendered sRGB images. We argue that evaluating the former gives a better indication how a CFA/demosaicking combination will work in practice, and that it is in the interest of the community to create a hyperspectral image dataset dedicated to that effect

CYCLOP: A stereo color image quality assessment metric

International audienceIn this work, a reduced reference (RR) perceptual quality metric for color stereoscopic images is presented. Given a reference stereo pair of images and their "distorted" version, we first compute the disparity map of both the reference and the distorted stereoscopic images. To this end, we define a method for color image disparity estimation based on the structure tensors properties and eigenvalues/eigenvectors analysis. Then, we compute the cyclopean images of both the reference and the distorted pairs. Thereafter, we apply a multispectral wavelet decomposition to the two cyclopean color images in order to describe the different channels in the human visual system (HVS). Then, contrast sensitivity function (CSF) filtering is performed to obtain the same visual sensitivity information within the original and the distorted cyclopean images. Thereafter, based on the properties of the human visual system (HVS), rational sensitivity thresholding is performed to obtain the sensitivity coefficients of the cyclopean images. Finally, RR stereo color image quality assessment (SCIQA) is performed by comparing the sensitivity coefficients of the cyclopean images and studying the coherence between the disparity maps of the reference and the distorted pairs. Experiments performed on color stereoscopic images indicate that the objective scores obtained by the proposed metric agree well with the subjective assessment scores

A No Reference Objective Color Image Sharpness Metric

International audienceIn this work, we propose a no reference color image quality assessment metric. The proposed metric makes use of a wavelet-based multiscale structure tensor [1] as an extension of the single-scale structure tensor proposed by Di Zenzo [15]. The multiscale structure tensor allows for accumulating multiscale gradient information of local regions of the color image. Thus, averaging properties are maintained while preserving edge structure. This structure tensor is capable of identifying edges in spite of the presence of noise. Once edges are identified, we define a sharpness metric based on the eigenvalues of the multiscale structure tensor. Particularly, we show that the difference of the eigenvalues of the multiscale structure tensor can be used to measure the sharpness of color edges. Based on this fact we formulate our no reference sharpness metric for color images. Experiments performed on LIVE database indicate that the objective scores obtained by the proposed metric agree well with the subjective assessment score