Historical Images Research Articles

Automatic detection of beacon towers in historical aerial images using improved FCOS

ABSTRACT Beacon towers are an importantinfrastructure responsible for transmitting military information in ancienttimes. However, many of the beacons have disappeared due to natural erosion andman-made vandalism. Historical U2 aerial images provide heritage andgeographical information over the last century to research the beacon towersystem. However, the fragmented distribution of beacons and the greyscalecolouring of the aerial images make it difficult to manually identifysmall-sized beacons in a wide range of aerials. This study introduced deeplearning to automatically detect beacons in U2 images. Three improvements wereadded to the standard Fully ConvolutionalOne-Stage Object Detection (FCOS) network: 1) Thestructure of the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) was adjusted to enhance thesmall objects feature at lower layers; 2) The standard convolutional kernel inbackbone network was replaced with DCNv2 to account for irregular towers; 3)NMS was replaced with Soft-NMS to improve the accuracy of the detection boxprediction. Our results demonstrate that more than 60% average precision (AP)can be obtained using our improved FCOS. After testing, the results showed thatthe three-part methodology can automatically detect most beacons in historicalU2 aerial images, reduce the manual miss rate, and improve efficiency. Theresults of the test were the first to successfully identify destroyed beacons,recreate the beacon route, and retrace the beacon siting strategy. Our methodhelps to speed up the efficiency of heritage excavation in historical aerialimages, and it may provide a convenient means of processing in otherarchitectural heritage restoration studies.

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

Rubber expansion and age-class mapping in the state of Tripura (India) 1990-2021 using multi-year and multi-sensor data.

The presentstudy focuses on the spread of rubber monoculture in the state of Tripura during past three decades (1990-2021) in the northeast region of India which is known for itsrich biodiversity, shifting cultivation, and extensive forest dynamics. Earth observation(EO) data of seven time periods from Landsat missions (1990, 1995, 2000, 2004, and2009) and Sentinel-2 (2016 and 2021) were the main source for mapping and were supplemented with MODIS-EVI temporal spectral profiles, GEDI-derived vegetation heights (2019), and Google Earth high-resolution historical images for additional cues to support discrimination, mapping, and accuracy assessment. The methodology for rubber used its unique phenology from spectral-temporal profile and multi-year comparison of patches and their dynamics for age-class mapping. The results indicate that in the state of Tripura (geographic area 1.08 Mha), the area under rubber increased from 0.3% in 1990 to 8.9% of the geographic area in 2021. The overall classification accuracy for the maps created for the years 1990, 1995, 2000, 2004, 2009, 2016, and 2021 was 84.2%, 83.9%, 84.8%, 88.0%, 86.0%, 86.7%, and 89.5%, respectively. New areas under rubber originated from various land cover classes including open forests, shifting cultivationlands, and scrub. Recent expansion has resulted in 84.3% of rubber plantations under the 10-year age class. Implications of this transformation of the natural landscape, biodiversity and biomass, and carbon pool assessment are discussed.

ЖАЗУУЧУ ОРГАЛЧА КЫДЫРБАЙДЫН РОМАНЫНДА ТАРЫХЫЙ ДООРДУН КӨРКӨМ СҮРӨТТӨЛҮШҮ (1-китебинин негизинде)

The article aims to reveal a brief development of the plot events described on the basis of the 1st book of the novel "Lions of the Mogolistan Forests" by Orgalch Kydyrbai, a famous writer of the Kyrgyz people living in China, and a description of several artistic images in it. The image of the famous Tagai Biya, or Tagai Khan, is depicted as the protagonist of the novel, and the description of several historical images created around him provides an opportunity for the development of the narrative. The psychological thoughts of the heroes of the novel, their purposeful actions, the patriotic courage of the soldiers, and the peculiarities of the description of military equipment that the Kyrgyz khans secretly used against their enemies will be considered in detail. The artistic description of the events in the novel is analyzed in chronological order, a brief description of the events described in this chronological direction is given, personal opinions and linguistic features used in the description by some authors are also mentioned, as well as means of artistic expression, it was proposed to be briefly mentioned. When writing the novel, the writer was able to deeply understand historical information and supplement it with the development of events in the novel, as well as convey it to readers through the psychological thinking of his characters.

Online fusion of multi-resolution multispectral images with weakly supervised temporal dynamics

Real-time satellite imaging has a central role in monitoring, detecting and estimating the intensity of key natural phenomena such as floods, earthquakes, etc. One important constraint of satellite imaging is the trade-off between spatial/spectral resolution and their revisiting time, a consequence of design and physical constraints imposed by satellite orbit among other technical limitations. In this paper, we focus on fusing multi-temporal, multi-spectral images where data acquired from different instruments with different spatial resolutions is used. We leverage the spatial relationship between images at multiple modalities to generate high-resolution image sequences at higher revisiting rates. To achieve this goal, we formulate the fusion method as a recursive state estimation problem and study its performance in filtering and smoothing contexts. Furthermore, a calibration strategy is proposed to estimate the time-varying temporal dynamics of the image sequence using only a small amount of historical image data. Differently from the training process in traditional machine learning algorithms, which usually require large datasets and computation times, the parameters of the temporal dynamical model are calibrated based on an analytical expression that uses only two of the images in the historical dataset. A distributed version of the Bayesian filtering and smoothing strategies is also proposed to reduce its computational complexity. To evaluate the proposed methodology we consider a water mapping task where real data acquired by the Landsat and MODIS instruments are fused generating high spatial–temporal resolution image estimates. Our experiments show that the proposed methodology outperforms the competing methods in both estimation accuracy and water mapping tasks.

The Case of Lucretia - Symbolizing the Political Reality

The myth of Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, raped by Sextus Tarquinius – the son of the last Roman king – is very influential in the Classical and Medieval literature, likewise in the Modern times in the different fields of science and art. Its pristine form is now lost in the distant past and it is possible to compare the sources to see several layers of its political, legal, and ethical interpretation. Following these elaborations, we find a history of different legal institutions and rhetoric argumentation. However, with the help of archaeological findings some elements of its historical image starts to appear being the model family values and religious beliefs built in the foundation of common cultural forms in Italy.

Assessment shoreline changes of El Alamein and Marina coastal area, northwestern coast of Egypt

New EL Alamein city (NAC) is located on the northwestern coast of Egypt 110 km western of Alexandria and just west of Marina resort. The city layout includes internal artificial lagoons circulated by jetties’ inlets connected to the Mediterranean Sea. Intermediate and multigrade groynes have been proposed to reduce intermediate and downdrift expected erosion. Shoreline erosion at the downdrift area of coastal jetties and sedimentation at lagoons inlets are considered critical issues which shall be balanced and modeled. Marina resort lagoons and protections are considered a prototype for NAC coastal structures and inlets. For Marina resort lagoons case study, shoreline changes have been digitized from Google Earth historical images and field measurements data between 1988 and 2021 by using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) software. Cutting natural longshore sediment deposits by Marina jetties has significantly eroded the downdrift area eastern of Marina border. Most of Marina downdrift area was under accretion(up to + 10 m/year) and little erosion areas before the protection work from 1985 to 1988 and with an average rate of −1.00 m / year from 1988 to 2001 during the construction of the jetties and groynes and with an average rate of −1.20 m/ year after the construction stages between 2005 and 2018. High rates of erosion with an average rate of −4.30 m/year were identified between 2019 and 2021 with the start of NAC coastal proposed structures. This research aims to assess the historical and current situation of NAC shoreline changes and use the similar near project of Marina resort to identify and mitigate the side effects of the proposed protection works of New EL Alamein City.

Vision-Based Moving-Target Geolocation Using Dual Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper develops a framework for geolocating ground-based moving targets with images taken from dual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Unlike the usual moving-target geolocation methods that rely heavily on accurate navigation state sensors or assumptions of the known target’s altitude, the proposed framework does not have the same limitations and performs geolocation of moving targets utilizing dual UAVs equipped with the low-quality navigation state sensors. Considering the Gaussian measurement errors and yaw-angle measurement bias provided by low-quality sensors, we first propose an epipolar constraint-based corresponding-point-matching method, which enables the historical measurement data to be used to estimate the current position of the moving target; after that, we propose a target altitude estimation method based on multiview geometry, which utilizes multiple images, including historical images, to estimate the altitude of the moving target; finally, considering the negative influence of yaw-angle measurement bias on the processes of target altitude estimation and parameter regression, we take advantage of multiple iterations among the two processes to accurately estimate the moving target’s two-dimensional position and the yaw-angle measurement biases of two UAVs. The effectiveness and practicability of the framework proposed in this paper are proved by simulation experiments and actual flight experiments.

The Image of an Ideal Russian Official Reflected in the Legislative Language and National Culture

The article presents how the image of a state and municipal employee, reflected in the Russian legislation of the 18th and 21st centuries has changed over the course of years. The article distinguishes main groups of characteristics in historical and modern images: professional and moral and ethical ones. The image of an official of the 21st century includes the semes ‘educated’, ‘experienced’, ‘diligent’, ‘objective’, ‘law-abiding’, ‘fair’, ‘decent’, ‘honest’, ‘benevolent’, ‘polite’ and ‘caring’. The image of an official in the legislation of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great contains the semes 'experienced', 'intelligent', 'reasonable', 'obedient', 'loyal', 'diligent', 'hard-working', 'law-abiding', 'fair', 'honest' , 'conscientious', 'decent', 'modest', 'philanthropic', 'benevolent', 'compassionate', 'polite' and 'selfless'. In the 21st century a number of professional characteristics of an employee has decreased by four times, whereas the number of moral and ethical characteristics has hardly changed. However, most of the historical nominations have been lost. There is a replacement of the former synonymic rows, hyponymic groups with modern generalizing words, including those of foreign origin, so the old semantic accents have practically not been preserved. The historical image of an employee is more expressive, personally oriented, close to the image of an ordinary respectable person. A modern image of an employee is more abstract and stereotypical. While maintaining a moral and ethical orientation of the reference image of an employee in the 21st century ethno-cultural constants “conscience”, “truth”, “justice”, “goodness” and “obedience” have lost their dominant positions. The purposefulness of speech modeling of the “official portrait” of an employee brings together the 18th and the 21st centuries. The Soviet era can be considered a break in the tradition of building and maintaining the reputation of state and municipal employees.

Гуманистические тенденции художественно-эстетической системы З. Н. Гиппиус в Петербургских дневниках 1914–1919 годов

The Petersburg diaries (“Blue Book,”, “Black Notebooks,” “Black Book,” and “Gray Notepad”) document the attitude of Z. N. Gippius to the events related to the historical upheavals in Russia in the early 20th century. Searching for new ideas about personal freedom and choice in the epoch of historical cataclysms, the writer asserts the principles of new spirituality allowing one withstand the great upheavals of the era and achieve true freedom, found in God as a guarantor of the harmonious personality development. This study has established that the writer solves the problems suggested in the diaries by comprehending the fate of Russia during the First World War and the February and October revolutions of 1917 and searching for new humanistic ideals. She condemns the destructive nature of the revolution that causes the loss of moral ideals. Of particular relevance to the writer is the assertion of a specific, effective and practical humanism that takes into account the moral component of human life, approves the moral way of life, and combines practical actions with a focus on the individual as the ultimate goal. For Gippius, the ideal is embodied in the Russian intelligentsia with humanistic ability to sympathy, compassion, sacrifice, and sanctity and potential to withstand the political cataclysms of Russia. The aesthetic findings of Gippius in her Petersburg diaries embrace the inclusion of various associative chains into the forms of auto-documentary literature, enrichment of particular historical images with universal symbols, and synthesis of lyrical self-expression and an epic worldview.

An Aesthetic Analysis of Hua Tuo's Historical Image

An Aesthetic Analysis of Hua Tuo's Historical Image

«ДАВИД САСУНСКИЙ» ОВАНЕСА ТУМАНЯНА: ОТ ТЕКСТА К ВИЗУАЛИЗАЦИИ

The article analyses the cultural context of the poem "David of Sasun". On the basis of critical discourse analysis, semiotics (C. S. Pearce) and reconstruction of historical memory the perception of the city of Sasun is studied, the peculiarities of historical memory and images of the enemy are reconstructed. Using the example of the poem "David of Sasun" by H. Tumanyan, the semiotic translation from sign-symbols (Tumanyan’s text) to the language of iconic signs (children’s illustrations) is analysed. The analysis of the empirical text showed that Tumanyan created his storyline without additional spatio-temporal details. Some motifs (the part of Sansara and Baghdasara) were omitted in his text because plot entanglements would have appeared. Tumanyan adhered to the "Homeric approach" and touched only one line of the epic, the third branch, dedicated to David of Sasun. The analysis of separate episodes, motifs, plots showed that Tumanyan reproduced the main scheme of the epic’s construction on the opposition of us vs. them, Armenians vs. Arabs, David vs. Msra Melik. The second part of the article presents the results of the study of a modern children’s illustrative project dedicated to H. Tumanyan’s poem. The composition of the children’s drawings is made according to the age peculiarities of the young artists, but the influence of adult project leaders (Sona Badoyan and others) is also noticeable. The analysis also showed that the image of the enemy Msra Melik is represented by Turkic facial features, which reflects the preserved national stereotypes.

Crimean Mosaic: Spatial Analysis of the Structure and Dynamics of the Regional Museum Network

Referring to the data of the author’s database of Crimean museums, this article offers a spatial analysis of the structure and dynamics of the museum network. The official digital resources (websites) of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Museums of Russia portal, the website of the Private and Folk Museums of Russia, and the websites of municipalities are used as the main sources of information. The database information makes it possible to reconstruct the images of the region, taking into account their geographic reference. The museum landscape of the region forms a polyphonic historical and cultural image of Crimea, which is divided into five clusters (zones): literary and historical (Southern coast of Crimea); military-historical (Sevastopol); historical and local history (steppe Crimea); historical and archaeological (Kerch Peninsula); historical and ethnographic (mountainous Crimea). Clusters differ in the structure of the museum network and the historical dynamics of its formation. The author analyses the features of the formation of each museum cluster and the images of the past it broadcasts. The image of the war is most intensively present in the museums of Sevastopol and Balaklava as the places of the deployment of the Black Sea Fleet. Literary Crimea is concentrated in cities and urban-type settlements of the southern coast of Crimea, where many famous writers rested, were treated, and created their works. Images of the Soviet past are disseminated by local history museums of the steppe Crimea. The ancient civilization and medieval Crimea are represented in the Kerch cluster and partly by the historical and archaeological museums of the South Coast and the mountainous Crimea. And, finally, the national (Crimean-Tatar) image of Crimea is preserved in the museums of Bakhchisaray and Simferopol. Such a complex mosaic of Crimean images is the result of the influence of external and internal factors — the richness and diversity of the historical and cultural heritage of the region formed over the centuries and the zigzags of the state cultural policy. The change of statehood over the twentieth century (imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet — Ukrainian and Russian — periods) has left its mark on the museum space of Crimea.

Integrating GIS and Semantic Web Technologies as a Next Step in the Evolution of Spatial Digital Humanities

With the advent of information technology, numerous initiatives have been launched by cultural heritage, academic and commercial institutions aiming at digitization, organization, visualization and analysis of historical information of a given place. These projects usually utilize GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to represent and analyze a restricted range of spatial data, such as archaeological findings or landmarks from a single information source. To take the emerging field of spatial history to the next level—the spatial digital humanities—the traditional spatial data should be enriched with cultural and social data from heterogeneous resources, such as historical books, administrative documents, images, and multimedia objects, and allow for deeper analysis of the historical places’ cultural and social context. To this end, ontologies and modern semantic web technologies should be combined with GIS technology to enable easy data standardization and integration, uniform data modeling, open-access and cross-project data sharing and analysis. In this paper, we review this combined approach and its utilization attempts in recent spatial digital humanities projects for cities from all over the globe while discussing the field’s main common challenges and their possible solutions.

Analysis of cellularity in H&E-stained rat bone marrow tissue via deep learning

Our objective was to develop an automated deep-learning-based method to evaluate cellularity in rat bone marrow hematoxylin and eosin whole slide images for preclinical safety assessment. We trained a shallow CNN for segmenting marrow, 2 Mask R-CNN models for segmenting megakaryocytes (MKCs), and small hematopoietic cells (SHCs), and a SegNet model for segmenting red blood cells. We incorporated the models into a pipeline that identifies and counts MKCs and SHCs in rat bone marrow. We compared cell segmentation and counts that our method generated to those that pathologists generated on 10 slides with a range of cell depletion levels from 10 studies. For SHCs, we compared cell counts that our method generated to counts generated by Cellpose and Stardist. The median Dice and object Dice scores for MKCs using our method vs pathologist consensus and the inter- and intra-pathologist variation were comparable, with overlapping first-third quartile ranges. For SHCs, the median scores were close, with first-third quartile ranges partially overlapping intra-pathologist variation. For SHCs, in comparison to Cellpose and Stardist, counts from our method were closer to pathologist counts, with a smaller 95% limits of agreement range. The performance of the bone marrow analysis pipeline supports its incorporation into routine use as an aid for hematotoxicity assessment by pathologists. The pipeline could help expedite hematotoxicity assessment in preclinical studies and consequently could expedite drug development. The method may enable meta-analysis of rat bone marrow characteristics from future and historical whole slide images and may generate new biological insights from cross-study comparisons.

57-Year Ice Velocity Dynamics in Byrd Glacier Based on Multisource Remote Sensing Data

Long time series glacier ice velocity reflects the local climate changes and can be used to estimate mass balance (MB) changes, which is a critical parameter for understanding of glacier-climate interactions and prediction of sea level rise. However, due to the difficulty in image matching caused by the poor-quality of historical satellite images, there was insufficient glacier ice velocity data before 1999. Here, we proposed a multiple-constraint dense image matching approach for mapping historical ice velocity based on the early poor-quality images from ARGON, Landsat-1, Landsat-4/5. We successfully applied this method to Byrd Glacier to generate its historical ice velocity maps from 1963 to 1999. Additionally, ice velocity maps of Byrd Glacier from 2000 to 2014 were generated by IMCORR software using Landsat-7, Landsat-8 images. Combining with the ice velocity maps from the Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction from Landsat-8 (GoLIVE) dataset since 2014, we obtained the ice velocity of Byrd Glacier for 57 years. Our results showed that the glacier experienced slight fluctuations in ice velocity, which may not be due to the calving events in the studied portion of the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) or the air temperature changes, but by the activity of subglacial drainage systems. Furthermore, Byrd Glacier showed a positive MB (average rate of 2.6 ± 2.0 Gt/y) from 1963 to 2020, indicating that global climate change may have a limited impact on it.

The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books

This book professes to be about nothing, but it actually deals with something important, if heretofore widely neglected: the deliberately blank spaces, erasures, and artificially enlarged voids in late medieval European arts, especially illuminated manuscripts. Gertsman asserts, in engaging prose, that these fecund spaces of emptiness were meant to be filled in by a reader's active imagination, informed by contemporary developments in theology, philosophy, and natural sciences. She focuses especially on the medium of parchment and its potential—as skin itself—to connote wounded flesh. The potency of absence in contemporary art is evident to anyone who has seen the 9/11 memorial in New York, but Gertsman shows that the exploration of emptiness usually associated with mid-twentieth-century and later art had ample medieval precedent.Gertsman finds absence pregnant with and productive of meaning. She analyzes the thirteenth-century surge in Creation imagery despite the evident challenge of representing the moment just before God created the world ex nihilo. She zeroes in on Europeans’ fear of the cipher zero and affirms a connection with apophatic theology. She shows how empty images in the fourteenth century prompted meditation and in the fifteenth century could be piously erased. She pokes at accidental and intentional penetrations of parchment. She does almost everything possible with her many nothings, and she argues that medieval readers/ viewers were similarly engaged.One term that surprises by its absence from Gertsman's book is iconoclasm (although iconoclastic does appear twice in the text). Presumably she did not find it a useful term within the chronological and geographic parameters defined in the book. Yet it might have been fruitful to consider this earlier (and also later) arena of absence. In many historical cases images were indeed “broken”—the literal meaning of the Greek term—to the point of elimination, including images of the incarnate God, but in others the traces were still eminently visible. One thinks, for instance, of the members of Theoderic's court in the sixth-century nave mosaic at Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna: their bodies have been replaced by fictive curtains, but their hands and forearms still stand out, ghostlike, against the intervening white columns. Their bodily absence makes them more present—a precedent for Gertsman's later manuscript examples (“Erasure only works when something remains”). The case of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (not quite effaced by Istanbul) is also intriguing. In the apse, the ninth-century mosaic of the Virgin and Child is now veiled from view in the church's recent reincarnation as a mosque. Veiling was a potent means of temporary erasure in both “Eastern” and “Western” medieval arts, a practice not addressed by Gertsman, but it was never part of Islamic practice until now.Gertsman's book fills a lacuna we did not even know we had. Scholars will surely identify more such paradoxical spaces and, like medieval readers before them, will fill them with interpretive brio.

Photography and diaspora

This essay utilizes the rich photographic collections of the Herrnhut Archive, Rijksmuseum and Tropenmuseum to explore alternative ways of understanding the colonial Indian labour diaspora, to infuse new meanings into old pictures and to draw upon the reinterpretation of historical images to reframe personal female migration stories from an artistic perspective. This essay presents an overview of the photography of colonial subjects in India and of her diaspora, and discusses the symbolism and representations of selected case studies of individuals and groups in the Dutch colonial territory of Surinam. From this analysis, the author presents the significance of her findings for the evolution of her own work as an Indian woman of diaspora heritage exploring new ways of articulating complex personal and group identities through the medium of exhibitions and installations.

Historical Memory of Dmitry Donskoy in the Pre-Petrine Period

The historical memory of Dmitry Donskoy in the first centuries after his death was primarily of a secular nature. His victory in the Kulikovo field determined the public perception of his image. Even during the life of Dmitry, there was a convergence between his image and the memory of Alexander Nevsky, but the question of church glorification of a victor over Mamai was not raised. The reason lay in Dmitry’s policy of active interference in the affairs of ecclesiastical authorities. Even a large-scale canonization of Russian saints, initiated by Metropolitan Macarius, left Dmitry Donskoy out. It can again be attributed to his difficult relationship with the church authorities. However, this didn’t prevent an increasing tendency of inclusion of the image of the Grand Duke as a talented military leader and conqueror of the Horde in the historical memory of his contemporaries and in the coordinate system of the ideology of the newly created unified Russian state. Ivan Grozny considered him one of the “historical models” for his own rule and emphasized his own descent from this glorious ancestor. In the 17th century, the nobles, constructing their genealogical history, tried to connect their origins with the boyars who went to the court of Dmitry Donskoy. The emerging “connection” of the historical image of Dmitry with Alexander Nevsky, canonized at the all-Russian level in 1547, was also preserved.

МУЗЕИ МАЛЫХ ГОРОДОВ РОССИИ: ОСОБЕННОСТИ МЕДИАЦИИ ЛОКАЛЬНОЙ ИСТОРИИ

The museum functions as an institution of memory, constructing images of the past and transmitting them to new generations. They are based on scientific ideas, social order and visitor requests, i.e. they differ from historical reality. This process is defined by the term “mediation”, which correlates with the concepts of “communication” and “interpretation”. Taking into account the specifics of the museum (historical, memorial, art), the features of mediation, the images of the past have their own differences and complement each other, constructing a unique image of the place. A special role in this process is played by local history museums aimed at comprehensive modeling and presentation of the local past. The image of the local history created by historical museums is reflected in the exposition and has some specifics. It has a space-time dimension, often supplemented by “action” (interactivity), and is also characterized by abstractness and conventionality, which is directly related to the language of description (scientific and / or literary). The current trend is characterized by active visualization and mythologization of the historical image, which is especially typical for museums in small towns. The article is based on the materials of a historical and sociological survey of 12 small towns in Russia using interview, observation, mind map methods (RSF grant No. 21-18-00418 “Museum of a small town. Tthe multiplicity of cultures of memory”). The program included the study of not only museums (state, municipal, school, home, folk, private), but also archives, libraries, media, i.e. all institutions of memory. Such an integrated approach made it possible to clarify the specifics of the museum “genre” of memorization.