Image Layout Research Articles

From design to interpretation: Lessons from a public health campaign promoting physical activity

Objective: Rising inactivity has led to an increase in health promotion campaigns aimed at encouraging healthy behaviour change. While this has become common place, often practices advised by social marketing to maximise effectiveness are overlooked. This study investigates the development and effectiveness of one particular physical activity public health campaign implemented in Liverpool, United Kingdom (UK). A formative evaluation feedback session was included to communicate findings back to key stakeholders to reflect on the experience and identify learning points for future campaigns. Design: Based on a pragmatic paradigm the study was conducted in three parts: (1) campaign designer interview; (2) public on-street survey; and (3) stakeholder formative evaluation feedback session. Setting: The context of this study was Liverpool, UK. Method: Deductive content analysis was guided by key themes of the campaign design, including the poster image, tagline, main text, and overall layout. Results: The design team had aimed for a ‘tongue in cheek’ image and message on which to base the campaign. However, the public survey suggests that the campaign largely failed to translate the proposed message and reach the intended Liverpool population. Formative evaluation feedback highlighted a lack of application of social marketing principles in campaign development, in particular audience targeting and pilot assessment. Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of the inclusion of social marketing principles in the development of health promotion campaigns in an attempt to aid audience understanding and adoption of the desired health behaviour.

The minimum attributes for displaying intraoral radiographic digital images under the DICOM standard

The purpose of this study was to determine the minimum attributes for display of intraoral (IO) radiographic digital images, on the basis of results of a survey completed by the Japanese Society for Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology (JSOMR). These attributes could then be used to develop proposals for the DICOM Standards Committee. In December 2010, the JSOMR Task Group carried out a survey on display mapping and viewing solutions for IO images in university dental hospitals in Japan. The survey showed that a finite number of templates were in use at Japanese university dental hospitals. However, these templates were too complex for proposals to DICOM, and we thus believed that further simplification of the layout format was necessary to improve operating system efficiency, data transferability, and patient welfare. The JSOMR survey found that eight types of layout format were used at university dental hospitals across Japan; using these data as a starting point, we tested whether reducing the number of formats to three patterns was a viable option. During the reduction of the number of formats, we determined the following discrete imaging attributes: examination classification; image aspect; image size; image location; and projection style. Furthermore, for foreign countries, two patterns, 18 and 22, were added to image location for further clarity. Five attributes are necessary for an effective new layout of IO images using a reference system.

A study of animated transition in similarity-based tiled image layout

For many information visualization applications, showing the transition when interacting with the data is critically important as it can help users better perceive the changes and understand the underlying data. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of animated transition in a tiled image layout where the spiral arrangement of the images is based on their similarity. Three aspects of animated transition are considered, including animation steps, animation actions, and flying paths. Exploring and weighting the advantages and disadvantages of different methods for each aspect and in conjunction with the characteristics of the spiral image layout, we present an integrated solution, called AniMap, for animating the transition from an old layout to a new layout when a different image is selected as the query image. We show the effectiveness of our animated transition solution by demonstrating experimental results and conducting a comparative user study.

Modeling the spatial layout of images beyond spatial pyramids

Several state-of-the-art image representations consist in averaging local statistics computed from patch-level descriptors. It has been shown by Boureau et al. that such average statistics suffer from two sources of variance. The first one comes from the fact that a finite set of local statistics are averaged. The second one is due to the variation in the proportion of object-dependent information between different images of the same class. For the problem of object classification, these sources of variance affect negatively the accuracy since they increase the overlap between class-conditional probabilities.Our goal is to include information about the spatial layout of images in image signatures based on average statistics. We show that the traditional approach to including the spatial layout – the spatial pyramid (SP) – increases the first source of variance while only weakly reducing the second one. We therefore propose two complementary approaches to account for the spatial layout which are compatible with our goal of variance reduction. The first one models the spatial layout in an image-independent manner (as is the case of the SP) while the second one adapts to the image content. A significant benefit of these approaches with respect to the SP is that they do not incur an increase of the image signature dimensionality. We show on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2008 and 2009 the benefits of our approach.

Use of Visual Analysis to Investigate Networked Learning in Online Forums

Asynchronous online forums such as FirstClass are frequently used in many educational settings to link networks of learners. They offer opportunities for knowledge-building dialogue and for the exchange of learning resources, but many students struggle to make effective use of them. Researchers have therefore been concerned to investigate how learners successfully build knowledge together in online forums and which skills and literacies are likely to help users to learn in these environments. To date, much of this research has focused on the textual elements of online forum dialogue. This paper acknowledges the importance of studying these textual elements, but presents visual analysis as a complementary tool that can significantly extend understanding of activity in these forums. Asynchronous dialogue, like written text, is typically both verbal and visual, with much of its meaning carried by a range of visual features, including layout and typographical elements. These aspects of forum data require analysis of the composition of the dialogue alongside its content. In the case of such composite texts, with meanings realised through different semiotic codes, visual and verbal elements interact and should be analysed as an integrated whole. This semiotic approach draws attention to the syntax of images as a source of meaning and to the structuring principles that enable viewers to make sense of the layout of text and images. These principles include salience, frames, vectors and reading paths. This paper demonstrates ways in which analysis that makes use of these structuring principles can increase understanding of online exchanges between learners. It takes as an exemplar a series of forum postings that were shared in the formal setting of an online course at the UK’s Open University. It shows that the construction of knowledge in an online forum is heavily reliant on visual elements of the online interaction, and that a focus on words alone does not make it clear either how this construction takes place or why it fails to take place on some occasions. Visual analysis shows that groups of learners use affordances of forum software to increase the salience of some elements of the dialogue and to increase the coherence of their discussion.

A Rapid Vote-Counting System Based on Image Understanding

This paper proposes a system, which can rapidly count votes in traditional elections based on image understanding. Firstly, the system gets ballot images through high-speed scanner and preprocesses the images. Then, it recognizes the geometric structure and layout of ballot image through detecting table lines. In addition, it also recognizes the logical structure of ballot image through analyzing the relative positions of candidates and vote symbols. Thirdly, it locates candidates and symbols on the ballot table, and recognizes the specific symbols based on run features. The system has been implemented, which shows high counting speed, high recognition accuracy with wide applicability.

Clinic application of Epub of medical imaging film in CT workflow

To investigate the clinical effects of the Epub of medical imaging film (EMIF) in CT workflow. All experiments were approved by the ethics committee of the local district. An EMIF application is fully implemented in PACS according to the DICOM 3.0 standard. For a statistical comparison in the effects of the EMIF in CT workflow, consecutive 50,000 CT hardcopy film prints have been randomly selected before and after the EMIF application in PACS, respectively. The role of the EMIF in the application of hardcopy films, the clinic practice, the integrality of the quality control data archived in PACS/RIS and so on is investigated. For consecutive 50,000 CT hardcopy films before vs. after the EMIF application respectively, the counts of wasted films are 21 vs. 14 sheets due to the hardware problem, 28 vs. 0 sheets owing to operation errors, and 24 vs. 0 sheets caused by serious defects in image layout. Reissuing films for lost films and other special needs is 60 vs. 55 sheets. The average reissuing film time for each case is 16.97±6.14 vs. 4.36±1.26 min (t=5.94, p<0.01). The EMIF application has offered more convenience for medical viewing and reviewing, and has enhanced the integrality of the quality control data archived in PACS/RIS (χ2=320.835, P<0.01). EMIF application in clinical healthcare can help enhance the function of PACS/RIS, and improve the quality and efficiency in CT routine work.

Simulated multiplexed CCTV: The effects of screen layout and task complexity on user performance and strategies

Successful closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance relies on the skill and competence of operators performing complex visual tasks. Techniques can be employed during the design of control rooms that facilitate performance by increasing the probability of operators noticing an incident, maximising viewing comfort and reducing workload. This article describes an exploratory study in which two experiments were developed to simulate a multiplexed CCTV security monitoring task of a specific area. The experiments investigated the effectiveness of techniques for facilitating operator performance: mapping the images presented on CCTV according to the layout and logical viewing process of multiple images. The findings suggested that manipulating the layout of images improved task efficiency and provided novel insights into strategies and behaviours that participants adopted. Further consideration was given to suspicious activities within the context of a university campus and raised interesting questions regarding the generalisation of suspicious acts across different locations.

Image Optimization Algorithm Based on Salient Region and Layout Adjustment

The purpose of image optimization is that the salient region of image is stand out, and is layout an image met the demand. The existed image optimization method is summarized, and their advantages and disadvantages respectively analyzed. The improved visual attention model is described, and is used to detect the salient region of image. The parameters of image optimization are calculated by the optimization function of image layout rules. At last, the weights of the images optimized parameters are adjusted by the image layout and adjustment function based on image optimized parameters, to achieve image layout and obtain the most optimal image, to realize image optimization. Experimental results validate that this methods not only achieve image optimization, but also accurately and automatically achieve to shorten distance and enlarge salient regions, improve the quality of the image optimization, and has good robustness.

Image Optimization Algorithm Based on Salient Region and Layout Adjustment

The purpose of image optimization is that the salient region of image is stand out, and is layout an image met the demand. The existed image optimization method is summarized, and their advantages and disadvantages respectively analyzed. The improved visual attention model is described, and is used to detect the salient region of image. The parameters of image optimization are calculated by the optimization function of image layout rules. At last, the weights of the images optimized parameters are adjusted by the image layout and adjustment function based on image optimized parameters, to achieve image layout and obtain the most optimal image, to realize image optimization. Experimental results validate that this methods not only achieve image optimization, but also accurately and automatically achieve to shorten distance and enlarge salient regions, improve the quality of the image optimization, and has good robustness.

Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence: Magazine Production with a Flickr Special Interest Group

Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence: Magazine Production with a Flickr Special Interest Group

Category Level Object Segmentation by Combining Bag-of-Words Models with Dirichlet Processes and Random Fields

This paper addresses the problem of accurately segmenting instances of object classes in images without any human interaction. Our model combines a bag-of-words recognition component with spatial regularization based on a random field and a Dirichlet process mixture. Bag-of-words models successfully predict the presence of an object within an image; however, they can not accurately locate object boundaries. Random Fields take into account the spatial layout of images and provide local spatial regularization. Yet, as they use local coupling between image labels, they fail to capture larger scale structures needed for object recognition. These components are combined with a Dirichlet process mixture. It models images as a composition of regions, each representing a single object instance. Gibbs sampling is used for parameter estimations and object segmentation. Our model successfully segments object category instances, despite cluttered backgrounds and large variations in appearance and viewpoints. The strengths and limitations of our model are shown through extensive experimental evaluations. First, we evaluate the result of two methods to build visual vocabularies. Second, we show how to combine strong labeling (segmented images) with weak labeling (images annotated with bounding boxes), in order to limit the labeling effort needed to learn the model. Third, we study the effect of different initializations. We present results on four image databases, including the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 data set on which we obtain state-of-the art results.

BRANDING NEWSPAPERS

Since the turn of the century there has been a trend towards newspaper re-branding with increased attention to fonts, colours, layout and choices of images. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) offers one useful tool for analysing the meaning potentials of these choices and the discourses that they realise. However, this paper, addressing one of the major criticisms of CDA, that it fails to consider the role of production factors in explaining textual choices, looks at these changes in the context of the re-branding of one newspaper. It shows how these must be understood as part of the more recent commercialisation of the news media, its alignment with marketing, and specifically with the market research profiling which lies behind the re-brand in this case. What we see are textual choices made in the context of news production aimed in the first place at consumers rather than citizens or readers. The paper demonstrates that failure to see the textual choices in the context of the social practice of news production would fail to provide any meaningful analysis.

Effectiveness of additional representations for the search result presentation on the web

The presentation of search results on the web has been dominated by the textual form of document representation. On the other hand, the document’s visual aspects such as the layout, colour scheme, or presence of images have been studied in a limited context with regard to their effectiveness of search result presentation. This article presents a comparative evaluation of textual and visual forms of document representation as additional components of document surrogates. A total of 24 people were recruited for our task-based user study. The experimental results suggest that an increased level of document representation available in the search results can facilitate users’ interaction with a search interface. The results also suggest that the two forms of additional representations are likely beneficial to users’ information searching process in different contexts.

Beyond the Edges of a View: Boundary Extension in Human Scene-Selective Visual Cortex

To allow perception of a continuous world, cortical mechanisms extrapolate missing information with highly constrained predictions about the environment just beyond the edges of a view. Here, we report functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence for extrapolation of scene layout information beyond what was physically presented, an illusion known as boundary extension. Consistent with behavioral reports, we observed boundary extension for scene-selective attenuation in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC), but no such extrapolation of object representations in the lateral occipital complex (LOC). These results demonstrate that scene layout representations are extrapolated beyond the confines of the perceptual input. Such extrapolation may facilitate perception of a continuous world from discontinuous views.

Computational modeling and experimental investigation of effects of compositional elements on interface and design aesthetics

This article describes computational modeling and two corresponding experimental investigations of the effects of symmetry, balance and quantity of construction elements on interface aesthetic judgments. In the first experiment, 30 black and white geometric images were developed by systematically varying these three attributes in order to validate computational aesthetic quantification algorithms with subject ratings. The second experiment employed the same image layout as Experiment 1 but with realistic looking web pages as stimuli. The images were rated by 16 subjects in each experiment using the ratio-scale magnitude estimation method against a benchmark image with average balance and symmetry values and a standard number of elements. Subjects also established an ordered list of the images according to their aesthetic appeal using the Balanced-Incomplete-Block (BIB) ranking method. Results from both experiments show that subjects are adept at judging symmetry and balance in both the horizontal and vertical directions and thus the quantification of those attributes is justified. The first experiment establishes a relationship between a higher symmetry value and aesthetic appeal for the basic imagery showing that subjects preferred symmetric over non-symmetric images. The second experiment illustrates that increasing the number of groups in a web page causes a decrease in the aesthetic appeal rating.

Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory James Jesson Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory. By William E. Engel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii, 200 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-19-925762-0. Emblematic images of skulls, ambulant skeletons, and other representations of death haunt the pages of William E. Engel's study of Renaissance literature and memory, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory. According to Engel, such images illustrate a seventeenth-century "aesthetic of decline," a sense of impending "oblivion," which to Engel covers everything from individual death to the collective ruin threatened by political and social crisis. However, even while manifesting this cultural unease, Engel argues, emblems and other Renaissance art forms provided audiences with a sense of overcoming decline. In demonstrating this through his study of Renaissance drama, foreign language phrase books, and historical compendia, Engel examines artistic applications of the classical ars memorativa (art of memory), a battery of mnemonic techniques revived during the Renaissance. Engel argues that the Renaissance imagination saw the regenerative power of the memory arts in general (with their promise to stem forgetfulness and thus human limitation), and their application in emblems and other literary texts, as weapons against death and decline. Like an emblem writ large, Engel's book is most effective when images complement text. His argument, therefore, is perhaps best demonstrated through one of the book's many illustrations. On the frontispiece to Walter Ralegh's The History of the World, which Engel discusses in the final section of his study, an anthropomorphic figure of history, holding the Earth above her head and standing before four pillars representing mortal learning, tramples the slouched figures of "Death" and "Oblivion" (126). While this image, in the context of Ralegh's history project, has specific resonances concerning what Ralegh saw as post-Elizabethan political decline, Engel argues that its portrayal of the triumph over "oblivion" corresponds to a general view of memory as regenerative force. While Engel provides some background on the memory arts, his book will be best received by those with prior knowledge of this subject and of earlier studies like Frances Yates's The Art of Memory. Nevertheless, in structuring his argument for those with lesser backgrounds, Engel does well to focus first on drama, with its natural connection to the memory theater, a frequently cited and easily illustrated component of the memory arts. Classical and Renaissance practitioners of the memory arts were counseled, as one technique, to place items they wished to remember in various locations of a mental theater. These thought-items were often iconic images meant to represent larger ideas. By remembering the layout of images within one's mental theater, one could recall a desired image, which would then discharge its corresponding information. Memory theaters thus functioned much as emblems do, with the memorable iconic image acting as powerful mnemonic placeholder for the emblem's verbal message. Engel argues that Renaissance drama employs emblematic principles as well, particularly through [End Page 91] dumb shows such as the pantomime preceding the Mousetrap play-within-a-play in Hamlet. Such "kinetic emblems," as Engel calls them, replicate the typical emblematic form, with the visual dumb show followed by commentary from characters viewing it, thus continuing the pattern of memorable image and verbal message. Through various such readings of memory-arts principles active in dramatic structure, Engel provides a useful methodology for examining other contemporary works. Of the three sections of Engel's study, this examination of drama should find the greatest audience, especially among those as familiar with Ford, Chapman, and Greene as with Marlowe and Shakespeare. The book's second section, on translation, represents the popular phrase books of John Florio as extensions of memory theater principles into the realms of philology and national psychology. While Engel offers provocative readings of these seemingly mundane texts, the very short section feels slight surrounded by more extensive discussions of drama and historical compendia. This latter section, which concludes the book with readings of Ralegh's History and Alexander Ross's continuation of Ralegh's The History of the World: The Second Part, examines these works through...

Spatial template extraction for image retrieval by region matching

This paper presents a template and its relation extraction and estimation (TREE) algorithm for indexing images from picture libraries with more semantics-sensitive meanings. This algorithm can learn the commonality of visual concepts from multiple images to give a middle-level understanding about image contents. In this approach, each image is represented by a set of templates and their spatial relations as keys to capture the essence of this image. Each template is characterized by a set of dominant regions, which reflect different appearances of an object at different conditions and can be obtained by the template extraction and analysis (TEA) algorithm through region matching. The spatial template relation extraction and measurement (STREAM) algorithm is then proposed for obtaining the spatial relations between these templates. Due to the nature of a template, which can represent object's appearances at different conditions, the proposed approach owns better capabilities and flexibilities to capture image contents than traditional region-based methods. In addition, through maintaining the spatial layout of images, the semantic meanings of the query images can be extracted and lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of image retrieval. Since no time-consuming optimization process is involved, the proposed method learns the visual concepts extremely fast. Experimental results are provided to prove the superiority of the proposed method.

이미지 필터와 제한조건을 이용한 문서영상 구조분석

문서영상 구조분석은 문서영상을 세부 영역으로 분할하는 과정과 분할된 영역을 문자, 그림, 표 등으로 분류하는 과정을 포함한다. 이 중 영역분류 과정에서 영역의 크기, 흑화소 밀도, 화소 분포의 복잡도는 영역을 분류하는 기준이 된다. 그러나 그림의 경우 이러한 기준들의 범위가 넓어 경계를 정하기 어려우므로 다른 형태에 비해 상대적으로 오분류의 비율이 높다. 본 논문에서는 그림과 문자를 분류하는 과정에서 영역의 크기, 흑화소 밀도, 화소 분포의 복잡도에 의한 영향을 줄이기 위하여 메디안 필터를 이용하고, 영역확장 필터(region expanding filter)와 제한 조건들을 이용하여 영역분류에서의 오분류를 수정함으로써 상용제품을 포함한 기존 방법에 비해 그림과 문자의 분류가 우수한 문서영상 구조 분석 방법을 제안한다. Document image layout analysis contains the process to segment document image into detailed regions and the process to classify the segmented regions into text, picture, table or etc. In the region classification process, the size of a region, the density of black pixels, and the complexity of pixel distribution are the bases of region classification. But in case of picture, the ranges of these bases are so wide that it's difficult to decide the classification threshold between picture and others. As a result, the picture has a higher region classification error than others. In this paper, we propose document image layout analysis method which has a better performance for the picture and text region classification than that of previous methods including commercial softwares. In the picture and text region classification, median filter is used in order to reduce the influence of the size of a region, the density of black pixels, and the complexity of pixel distribution. Futhermore the classification error is corrected by the use of region expanding filter and constrained conditions.

Baffled and Dismayed

Dear Editors: Thank you for the two copies of TDR Spring  in which my photographs of ZONE appear. I am pleased with the layout and reproduction of the images in the text and appreciate the proper photo credits. In the -odd years I have been in the publishing world, I find your decision to use the image of the improvised greenroom in India over the image on page  of Rachel to be one of the most myopic, incomprehensible, substandard, taste-defying, poorly designed and executed editorial choices I have experienced in my career. Viewing its cluttered irrelevance gives new meaning to the notion of anti-art and visual insensitivity. I have respected and enjoyed your publication for many years—but remain baffled and dismayed.