Where to draw the line?

We often take people’s ability to understand and produce line drawings for granted. But where should we draw lines, and why? We address psychological principles that underlie efficient representations of complex information in line drawings. First, 58 participants with varying degree of artistic experience produced multiple drawings of a small set of scenes by tracing contours on a digital tablet. Second, 37 independent observers ranked the drawings by how representative they are of the original photograph. Matching contours between drawings of the same scene revealed that the most consistently drawn contours tend to be drawn earlier. We generated half-images with the most- versus least-consistently drawn contours and asked 25 observers categorize the quickly presented scenes. Observers performed significantly better for the most compared to the least consistent half-images. The most consistently drawn contours were more likely to depict occlusion boundaries, whereas the least consistently drawn contours frequently depicted surface normals.

Where to Draw The Line?

We often take people’s ability to understand and produce line drawings for granted. But where should we draw lines, and why? We address fundamental principles that underlie efficient representations of complex information in line drawings. First, 58 participants with varying degree of artistic experience produced multiple drawings of a small set of scenes by tracing contours on a digital tablet. Second, 37 independent observers ranked the drawings by how representative they are of the original photograph. Overall, artists’ drawings ranked higher than non-artists’. Matching contours between drawings of the same scene revealed that the most consistently drawn contours tend to be drawn earlier. We generated half-images with the most-versus least-consistently drawn contours by sorting contours by their consistency scores. Twenty five observers performed significantly better in a fast scene categorization task for the most compared to the least consistent half-images. The most consistent contours were longer and more likely to depict occlusion boundaries. Using psychophysics experiments and computational analysis, we confirmed quantitatively what makes certain contours in line drawings special: longer contours mark occlusion boundaries and aid rapid scene recognition. They allow artist and non-artists to convey important information starting from the first few strokes in their drawing process.

The Role of Hyperrealism in Painted Portraiture –Engaging Culture: Analysis of Portraiture by Eddy Ochieng

Portraiture remains one of the most fascinating genres of Art; it is engaging, intriguing and often, perhaps, a little controversial. Portraiture has been executed through the centuries in a variety of styles and media and for different purposes, from the ancient Egyptian cave paintings, through the medieval civilisations to the renaissance, new world, the great divide, modern era and ultimately to post-modernism pop art portraiture. One question that has always resurfaced in the interrogation of portraiture is what is the role of portraiture. There have also been incessant questions about the effectiveness or even need for some painting styles used in portraiture as well as other genres. Within contemporary Art, one of these styles that have often generated passionate arguments between those who love it and those who do not subscribe to it is hyperrealism. Detractors of hyperrealism, which started in the early 1970s, have consistently argued that by virtue of its reliance upon photography, what it seeks to portray is already achieved through photography and hence it is artistically ‘pointless’ since it serves no further visual purpose. Dwelling specifically on this artistic ‘pointlessness’, they have even questioned whether hyperrealism is Art or just a very refined and admirable show of skill. Proponents of hyperrealism, however, bask in the satisfaction that it retrieves all photographic cues from a digital image or a high-resolution photograph and converts or transforms these into a different realm of artistry and perfection by the placement of even more minute and meticulous details that would otherwise be invisible to the eye. This creativity culminates in an entirely new form, an ‘illusion of reality’ more artistically and visually engaging than the original photograph. The detractors, therefore, state that since hyperrealism is derived from photography as a reference base, then it is redundant as a style. In order to address this query, this paper examines the role of hyperrealism in modern portraiture as it is specifically applied to Kenyan portraiture executed by Eddie Ochieng’, an outstanding Kenyan hyperrealist, in order to determine its own ‘visual efficacy’ as a sub-genre. The portraiture itself, as featured in this paper, focuses on aspects of culture to explore the overall visual impact as a result of the application of hyperrealism.

GEOMETRIC DISTORTION OF HISTORICAL IMAGES FOR 3D VISUALIZATION

Archivists, historians and national mapping agencies, among others, are archiving large datasets of historical photographs. Nevertheless, the capturing devices used to acquire these images possessed a diversity of effects that influenced the quality of the final resulting picture, e.g. geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, depth of field variation, etc. This paper examines singularly the topic of geometric distortion for a co-visualization of historical photos within a 3D model of the photographed scene. A distortion function of an image is ordinarily estimated only on the image domain by adjusting its parameters to observations of point correspondences. This mathematical function may exhibit overfits, oscillations or may not be well defined outside of this domain. The contribution of this work is the description of a distortion model defined on the whole undistorted image plane. We extrapolate the distortion estimated only on the image domain and then transfer this distortion information to the view of the 3D scene. This enables to look at the scene through an estimated camera and zoom out to see the context around the original photograph with a well-defined and behaved distortion. These findings may be a significant addition to the overall purpose of creating innovative ways to examine and visualize old photographs.

A robust self-driven surface crack detection algorithm using local features

This paper presents an effective image analysis method for visual surface crack detection, called a robust self-driven crack detection algorithm (RSCDA). Firstly, a local texture anisotropy (LTA) is estimated based on self-driven local feature statistics from the original photograph. Secondly, the LTA is used to detect candidate crack pixels. Finally, the actual crack pixels are accurately identified using two effective measurements for connected domains based on discriminative direction and relative sparse features. The results demonstrate that the RSCDA is an effective and robust surface crack detection method for building materials or textiles.

Perception of dental professionals and lay people to altered facial esthetics

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to examine whether dental professionals and lay people group do agree in their perception of digitally altered facial components or not.Materials and MethodsA frontal photograph of a Saudi young man was taken, imported, and digitally altered to a series of images of 16 photographs. Eyes, nose, mouth, and chin were altered gradually from the original photograph and were rotated 1°, 3°, and 5°. 225 raters (60 lay people, 41 orthodontists, 77 dentists, and 47 dental students) were invited and asked to evaluate the original and altered images using a visual analog scale.ResultsLay people were less critical and gave higher ratings than dentists when evaluating rotated eyes of 5°. Orthodontists gave higher ratings than lay people and dental students at distinguishing of 1° of rotated nose. Orthodontists were less critical in rating larger alterations of the nose at 3° than lay people. Orthodontists were also less discriminating of minor alterations of the lips. They could not detect mouth rotation of 1° compared to lay people and dental students.ConclusionsThe results of this study underline the importance of developing an objective index to enumerate the magnitude of facial asymmetries.

DEVELOPMENT OF ANDROID APPLICATION FOR FAST AND BETTER ONLINE STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

This paper presents an android application developed for Better Picture Exchange. The existing techniques for Picture Exchange werenot much effective as they are either fast or provide quality. The technique discussed in this paper will provide speed and quality as well. The existing applications gave the option to either transfer the original photograph or the compressed photograph. When a user wanted to view photos from a large collection, it took a long time to download and consumedmore data. The technique discussed in this paper will consume fewer data and will take less time for the retrieval of the photos. Such software will be useful and efficient in almost every field of working and other parts of the world. The application is capable to compress the picture during the showing and download original picture file without compressing.

Parallax Error: The Aesthetics of Image Censorshipe

Parallax Error is a found photographic image collection scavenged from well-known art history publications in bookstores in Cairo between 2012 and 2014. What makes the series distinct are the forms and styles of censorship used on the original images ahead of sale and public distribution. The altered images involve some of the leading figures in the canon of Western photographic history and these respected photo works enter into a process of state censorship. This entails hand-painting each photograph, in each book edition, in order to obscure the full erotic effect of the object of desire, i.e. parts of the human body. The position of photography within Egypt and much of the Arab world is a contested one shaped by the visual formations of Orientalism created by the impact of European colonial empires in the region. This archival project examines the intersection of visual cultures embedded behind the series of photographic images that have been transformed through acts of censorship in Egypt. This frames how these doctored photographic images impose particular meanings on the original photographs and the potential merits, if any, of iconoclastic intervention. Parallax Error examines the political and aesthetic status of the image object in the transformation from the original photograph to censored image. The ink and paint marks on the surface of the photograph create a tension between the censorship act and its impact on the original. These hybrid images provide a political basis to rethink visual culture encounters in our interconnected and increasingly globalised contemporary image world. Keywords: aesthetics, censorship, iconoclasm, images, representation

3-D stereoscopic modeling of the Tesla’s Long Island

paper presents in detail the methods for realization of the basic software infrastructure for the conversion of 3-D animation of Tesla?s laboratory in Long Island to modern stereoscopic 3-D formats. Modeling of Tesla?s lab is done in cooperation with the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade on a project entitled ?Computer Simulation and Modeling of the Original Patents of Nikola Tesla? approved by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia. In recent years, there has been a revolution in the field of 3-D technology, so it is clear that this will be the strategic direction of the progressing of television, cinema screenings and presentations in the future. Using modern technology for generating and conversion to stereoscopic 3-D format, the authors show in detail the procedure that was used in the realization of this segment of the project. The complete improved 3D developing pipeline from the original photograph to the stereoscopic 3D real-time model is also presented. The novelty in the phase of semi-automatic materialization of the wire models is also described.

Influence of occlusal plane inclination and mandibular deviation on esthetics

Objective:The aim of this study was to assess the degree of perception of occlusal plane inclination and mandibular deviation in facial esthetics, assessed by laypeople, dentists and orthodontists.Methods:A woman with 5.88° of inclination and 5.54 mm of mandibular deviation was selected and, based on her original photograph, four new images were created correcting the deviations and creating more symmetric faces and smiles. Examiners assessed the images by means of a questionnaire. Their opinions were compared by qualitative and quantitative analyses.Results:A total of 45 laypeople, 27 dentists and 31 orthodontists filled out the questionnaires. All groups were able to perceive the asymmetry; however, orthodontists were more sensitive, identifying asymmetries as from 4.32° of occlusal plane inclination and 4.155 mm of mandibular deviation (p< 0.05). The other categories of evaluators identified asymmetries and assigned significantly lower grades, starting from 5.88° of occlusal plane inclination and 5.54 mm of mandibular deviation (p< 0.05).Conclusion:Occlusal plane inclination and mandibular deviation were perceived by all groups, but orthodontists presented higher perception of deviations.