Natural Photographs Research Articles

Spiders (review)

Reviewed by: Soupy Saturdays with the Pain & the Great One Hope Morrison Blume, Judy Soupy Saturdays with the Pain & the Great One; illus. by James Stevenson. Delacorte, 2007108p Library ed. ISBN 978-0-385-90324-0$16.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-385-73305-2$12.99 Ad Gr. 2-4 Renowned nature photographer and illustrator of Sy Montgomery's The Tarantula Scientist (BCCB 4/04), Bishop now offers an overview focused on spiders and spiders alone. Text describes spider characteristics and diet, spider behavior and reproduction in compact and pithy prose, but the gallery of vivid, closeup spider photographs almost renders the text superfluous. Each spread features a large image, sometimes full page, sometimes three-quarter spread, sometimes full-spread with text nestling in a less-busy corner of the picture, with page color carefully corresponding to a key color in the photograph; pictured spiders are varied in species (yes, fans, the black widow and the tarantula each make an appearance). The foldout spread in the middle depicts a stop-motion-style view of a jumping spider making its leap, but kids will already be sucked in by closeups of fangs and writhing masses of spider babies; this is one self-selling book. A concluding note describes Bishop's sometimes exacting photographic techniques, and an index and glossary are included. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Thomson Times and Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006)

Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006) is a collaboration between Rolf de Heer and members of the Ramingining community in eastern Arnhem Land. The film ostensibly has two time frames: a ‘mythical past’ which could be called ‘the Dreaming’ and the historical time in which the protagonist, Dayindi, lives, which is given as ‘1000 years ago’ (Vertigo 2006: 3). The development of Ten Canoes drew upon the writings of Donald Thomson and his collection of over 2500 ethnographic photographs, 1500 natural history photographs and 5500 objects from Arnhem Land, now held at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. One fourth of the material culture items consist of objects worn on the body, which I have termed ‘bodywear’ (Hamby 2006). In tracing community use of, and responses to, the Thomson Collection, I argue that members of the Ramingining community understand one strand of the Ten Canoes plot, Dayindi's story, to take place in the time of those relatives who had met and worked with Thomson: in both their production and reception of Dayindi's story, it takes place not 1000 years ago but in ‘Thomson Times’.

Hierarchical Stochastic Image Grammars for Classification and Segmentation

We develop a new class of hierarchical stochastic image models called spatial random trees (SRTs) which admit polynomial-complexity exact inference algorithms. Our framework of multitree dictionaries is the starting point for this construction. SRTs are stochastic hidden tree models whose leaves are associated with image data. The states at the tree nodes are random variables, and, in addition, the structure of the tree is random and is generated by a probabilistic grammar. We describe an efficient recursive algorithm for obtaining the maximum a posteriori estimate of both the tree structure and the tree states given an image. We also develop an efficient procedure for performing one iteration of the expectation-maximization algorithm and use it to estimate the model parameters from a set of training images. We address other inference problems arising in applications such as maximization of posterior marginals and hypothesis testing. Our models and algorithms are illustrated through several image classification and segmentation experiments, ranging from the segmentation of synthetic images to the classification of natural photographs and the segmentation of scanned documents. In each case, we show that our method substantially improves accuracy over a variety of existing methods.

Rapid categorization of foveal and extrafoveal natural images: Associated ERPs and effects of lateralization

Humans are fast and accurate at performing an animal categorization task with natural photographs briefly flashed centrally. Here, this central categorization task is compared to a three position task in which photographs could appear randomly either centrally, or at 3.6° eccentricity (right or left) of the fixation point. A mild behavioral impairment was found with peripheral stimuli with no evidence in support of hemispheric superiority; but enlarging the window of spatial attention to three possible stimuli locations had no behavioral cost on the processing of central images. Performance in the central categorization task has been associated with a large difference between the potentials evoked to target and non-target correct trials, starting about 150 ms after stimulus onset on frontal sites. Present results show that this activity originates within extrastriate visual cortices and probably reflects perceptual stimuli differences processed within areas involved in object recognition. Latencies, slopes, and peak amplitudes of this differential activity were invariant to stimulus position and attentional load. Stimulus location uncertainty and lateralization did not affect speed of visual processing.

Sea turtles: a complete guide to their biology, behavior, and conservation

For more than a hundred million years, sea turtles have been swimming in the world's oceans. These magnificent, long-lived creatures spend their lives in the water, coming ashore to lay their eggs. Upon hatching, the baby turtles leave the nest and enter a dangerous world of storms and predators. The females will return to the same beach to lay their own eggs when they reach maturity a decade later. Today, there are seven species of sea turtle: the grass-eating green turtle; the sea sponge-eating hawksbill; the olive ridley; the Kemp's ridley, which is the smallest species; the loggerhead; the flatback of Australia; and the giant leatherback. Having escaped the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, these ancient reptiles today face new dangers that threaten their survival: pollution, hunting, and the destruction of their nesting grounds. Will this century be the last to witness their majesty? Will succeeding generations live in a world devoid of their graceful presence? Marine biologist James R. Spotila has spent much of his life unraveling the mysteries of these graceful creatures and working to ensure their survival. In Sea Turtles, he offers a comprehensive and compelling account of their history and life cycle based on the most recent scientific data-and suggests what we can do now to save them. From the Kemp's ridley, which nests on a single beach on Mexico's Gulf Coast, to the nomadic leatherback, which can weigh up to a ton and is in the most imminent danger of extinction, Spotila offers a vivid description of their diets and mating habits, and the conservation efforts being made on their behalf. Illustrated with stunning color photographs by the world's leading nature photographers, Sea Turtles will inform and inspire readers of all ages everywhere.

APsaA Leader Strives To Secure Field's Future

APsaA Leader Strives To Secure Field's Future

The Natural history of Madagascar

Separated from the mainland of Africa for 160 million years, has evolved an incredible wealth of biodiversity, with thousands of species that can be found nowhere else on earth. For instance, of its estimated 12,000 plant species, nearly 10,000 are unique to Madagascar. Malagasy animals are just as spectacular, from its almost forty currently recognized species of lemursa primate group found only hereto the numerous species of tiny dwarf chameleons. With astounding frequency scientists discover a previously unknown species in Madagascarand at almost the same rate another natural area of habitat is degraded or destroyed, a combination that recently led conservation organizations to name one of the most important and threatened conservation priorities on the planet. The Natural History of Madagascar provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date synthesis available of this island nation's priceless biological treasures. Contributions by nearly three hundred world-renowned experts cover the history of scientific exploration in Madagascar, its geology and soils, climate, forest ecology, human ecology, marine and coastal ecosystems, plants, invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Detailed discussions of conservation efforts in highlight several successful park reserve programs that could serve as models for other areas. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book includes over one hundred color illustrations, with fifty color photos by nature photographer Harald Schutz, as well as more than three hundred black-and-white photographs and line drawings. The Natural History of Madagascar will be the invaluable reference for anyone interested in the Malagasy environment, from biologists and conservationists to policymakers and ecotourists.

Finding and labeling the subject of a captioned depictive natural photograph

We address the problem of finding the subject of a photographic image intended to illustrate some physical object or objects (depictive) and taken by usual optical means without magnification (natural). This could help in developing digital image libraries since important image properties like subject size and color of a photograph are not usually mentioned in accompanying captions and can help rank the photograph retrievals for a user. We explore an approach that identifies the of the image and the depicted concepts in a caption and connects them. The visual focus is determined by using eight domain-independent characteristics of regions in the segmented image, and the caption depiction is identified by a set a rules applied to the parsed and interpreted caption. The visual-focus determination also does combinatorial optimization on sets of regions to find the set that best satisfies focus criteria. Experiments on 100 randomly selected image-caption pairs show significant improvement in precision of retrieval over simpler methods, and, particularly, emphasizes the value of segmentation of the image.

Face identification using one spike per neuron: resistance to image degradations

The short response latencies of face selective neurons in the inferotemporal cortex impose major constraints on models of visual processing. It appears that visual information must essentially propagate in a feed-forward fashion with most neurons only having time to fire one spike. We hypothesize that flashed stimuli can be encoded by the order of firing of ganglion cells in the retina and propose a neuronal mechanism, that could be related to fast shunting inhibition, to decode such information. Based on these assumptions, we built a three-layered neural network of retino-topically organized neuronal maps. We showed, by using a learning rule involving spike timing dependant plasticity, that neuronal maps in the output layer can be trained to recognize natural photographs of faces. Not only was the model able to generalize to novel views of the same faces, it was also remarkably resistant to image noise and reductions in contrast.

ラジコンヘリ空撮写真の画像解析による水稲病害虫の被害推定

ラジコンヘリ空撮写真の画像解析による水稲病害虫の被害推定

ラジコンヘリ空撮写真の画像解析による水稲病害虫の被害推定

ラジコンヘリ空撮写真の画像解析による水稲病害虫の被害推定

Photograph retrieval and classification by visual keywords and thesaurus

As we collect more digital images with the advent of digital cameras, we need effective content-based search and categorization functions. In this paper, we propose a novel notion of visual keywords to describe and compare digital visual contents. Visual keywords are visual prototypes extracted from a visual content domain with semantics labels. They can be further abstracted to form visual thesaurus. An image is indexed as a spatial distribution of visual keywords. Both retrieval and classification evaluation tasks on professional natural scene photographs have demonstrated the usefulness of this new methodology.

ラジコンヘリ空撮写真の画像解析による水稲病害虫の被害推定

カラーリバーサルフィルムを用いてラジコンヘリコプターから空撮した葉いもち被害水田の写真を画像解析装置に取り込み, R (赤) G (緑) B (青) の3バンドのデジタル画像データとした。 被害水田内の試験区の画像からR, G, B各バンドのヒストグラムの平均値を用い, 試験区ごとに19種類の空撮画像バンド間演算値を算出した。 これらの空撮画像バンド間演算値と試験区における葉いもちの株当たり病斑数または平均病斑面積率との相関関係を比較した結果, RとGの2バンドを用いた演算 (G-R)/(G+R) が, 葉いもちの株当たり病斑数または平均病斑面積率と各年を通じて最も相関が高かった。

Primates: the amazing world of lemurs, monkeys, and apes

Internationally renowned nature photographer Art Wolfe has created a rare and moving portrait of Earth's vanishing primates. An incredible visual journey, Primates offers an exciting glimpse of gorillas, monkeys, apes, and other primates at home in the jungle. Wolfe traveled around the globe capturing as many species of primates on film as possible, journeying to the remote jungles of Central and South America, Uganda, and Rwanda, and to research centers and wildlife refuges worldwide. The resulting photographs celebrate the exotic beauty of these intelligent and, all too often, endangered species. From the playful antics of adolescents to the tender gestures between mother and child, Primates reveals an animal culture that has been, until now, almost completely inaccessible. Biologist Barbara Sleeper's accompanying text presents fascinating insights drawn from her many years spent observing primates. A marvelous blend of word and image, Primates offers a studied look at these remarkable creatures and their vanishing habitat.

Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future. By John Hart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xv + 211 pp. Illustrations, photographs, select bibliography, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $29.95

A dramatic environmental saga unfolds in John Hart's compelling story of the fight to save Lake. This ancient inland sea, in the eastern Sierra near Yosemite National Park, is among the oldest in North America. But over the past fifty years, as its feeder streams were steadily drained to supply water to ever-growing, ever-thirsty Los Angeles, the lake's water volume eventually was reduced by half. Lake's bizarre but productive ecosystem began to collapse: salinity greatly increased, nesting and migrating birds were threatened, and fierce alkali dust storms became a common occurrence. Then, in the mid-1970s, a handful of people, most of them students with minimal financial resources, began a campaign to save the dying lake. They took on not only Los Angeles but the entire state government and a whole way of thinking about water. Their fight seemed doomed in the beginning, but long years of grassroots education and effort finally paid off. In 1994, the California Water Resources Control Board ruled that Los Angeles's use of Lake's waters be restricted. Over time, the lake will return to a healthy condition. John Hart integrates natural, social, and political history into a story that is a source of hope for anyone concerned about the environment. Storm over Mono demonstrates the important role of science in public policy debates and validates the concept of the public trust, the idea that certain things belong to us all, not metaphorically but in simple legal fact. Complementing Hart's narrative are 32 stunning colour photo-graphs by a dozen leading nature photographers, along with numerous black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps.

Code of Ethics for Nature Photographers

Code of Ethics for Nature Photographers

Linear perspective and the Ponzo illusion: a comparison between rhesus monkeys and humans1

Abstract: Rhesus monkeys trained to classify bars of different lengths as “long” or “short” were tested for their bias of this classification when photographic linear perspective was superimposed on the bar. The photograph was either an upright or an upside down picture of the landscape that provided good linear perspective to human eyes. In Experiment 1, these photographs appeared together with the upward‐converging lines. The rhesus monkeys reported “long” more often when the target was located above the center of the stimulus, that is, near the apex of the converging line, than when it was located below the center, irrespective of the orientation of the photograph. In Experiment 2, the photographs appeared without the converging lines. The subjects showed a bias similar to, but less than, Experiment 1 only for the upright photograph. No bias was found for the upside down photograph. It was concluded that in nonhuman primates photographic linear perspective induces the Ponzo illusion, but the effect is so small that it is overshadowed by the converging lines typically used to produce the Ponzo illusion. In Experiment 3, humans tested in a comparable procedure perceived the illusion as long as the upright picture was there, irrespective of the presence or absence of the converging lines. This suggested that linear perspective provided by natural photographs strongly induces the illusion in humans.

Photographs of Libya 2

AbstractThe Editor introduces the second of an occasional series for the reproduction of early photographs of Libya. The group of photographs selected were taken in the Cyrenaica in 1894 during a visit by Herbert Weld-Blundell to assess its suitability for excavation. Photographs of a similar nature are requested for future publication.

1432 Experiences with the “patient's book”

Cancer patients, in particular, have a need to communicate with care-givers on their own terms. To meet this demand, we created an individual "patient's book" based on; (A) objective, written information dealing with diagnostic procedures, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, surgery and discharge. We followed the quality assurance process, dividing the information problems into structure, process and outcome. (B) an artistic lay-out to meet the patient's feelings of distress. To add a psychological dimension to the book, an authoress, a nature photographer and a painter were engaged. Patients in the ward evaluated A in 1993/94. This time patients evaluated both A and B one week after discharge, by filling in an anonymous questionnaire with four-level scales or yes/no questions. Preliminary results show that patients now are more aware of side-effects of their treatment. Other results may indicate that patients receive written information alone, not in combination with oral, as clearly was the intention. Furthermore, the evaluation reveals that the patients are very happy with our "patient's book".

The U.S. Geophysical Data Center can provide natural hazards damage photographs

The U.S. Geophysical Data Center can provide natural hazards damage photographs