Details Of Scene Research Articles

Temporally coherent local tone mapping of HDR video

Recent subjective studies showed that current tone mapping operators either produce disturbing temporal artifacts, or are limited in their local contrast reproduction capability. We address both of these issues and present an HDR video tone mapping operator that can greatly reduce the input dynamic range, while at the same time preserving scene details without causing significant visual artifacts. To achieve this, we revisit the commonly used spatial base-detail layer decomposition and extend it to the temporal domain . We achieve high quality spatiotemporal edge-aware filtering efficiently by using a mathematically justified iterative approach that approximates a global solution. Comparison with the state-of-the-art, both qualitatively, and quantitatively through a controlled subjective experiment, clearly shows our method's advantages over previous work. We present local tone mapping results on challenging high resolution scenes with complex motion and varying illumination. We also demonstrate our method's capability of preserving scene details at user adjustable scales, and its advantages for low light video sequences with significant camera noise.

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Direct suppression as a mechanism for controlling unpleasant memories in daily life.

Suppressing unwanted memories can impair their later recall. Recent work shows that this forgetting is achieved by at least two mechanisms supported by distinct neural systems: thought substitution and direct suppression (Benoit & Anderson, 2012). Here, we examined whether direct suppression, thought to be achieved by down-regulation of hippocampal activity, can disrupt memory of aversive scenes, and, if so, whether this disruption is linked to people’s perception of their ability to control intrusive thoughts. We presented participants with strong naturalistic reminders to aversive scenes and asked them to either covertly retrieve or directly suppress the associated scenes. Later, participants were cued with the reminders and asked to recall the scenes in detail. Direct suppression reduced recall probability of the scenes and also reduced the number of details recalled, even when scenes were remembered. Deficits in recall arose for minor details but also for details central to each scene’s gist. Participants with higher self-perceived control abilities over intrusive thoughts showed greater forgetting than did those reporting lower levels of control. These findings suggest that inhibitory processes underlying direct suppression can disrupt retention of aversive visual memories and link those processes to individual differences in control over intrusive thoughts in everyday life. These findings reinforce the possibility that inhibition may be less efficient in people likely to acquire posttraumatic stress disorder in the wake of a traumatic experience.

Rereading Dam Street in the Chinese Cultural Context

As an emerging film director, Yu Li has yet to be recognized by the international academic critics. By examining Hongyan/Dam Street in the Chinese cultural context with the assistance of analyzing scenes in detail and the film’s visual style, this article argues that the film illustrates the protagonist Xiaoyun is stuck between traditions and modernity, providing a sophisticated insight to an important feminist issue. The reading of the traditions involves chastity code, the image of a rouge face which is the translation of the film’s Chinese title, the Chinese four-character idioms, the time-honoured terms, the development of feminism, and the characteristics of the modernity in China. The perversity of the modernity originates from the social commercialization. Prejudices from the traditions and the modernity leave little space for women to settle in.

Timing matters: sonar call groups facilitate target localization in bats.

To successfully negotiate a cluttered environment, an echolocating bat must control the timing of motor behaviors in response to dynamic sensory information. Here we detail the big brown bat's adaptive temporal control over sonar call production for tracking prey, moving predictably or unpredictably, under different experimental conditions. We studied the adaptive control of vocal-motor behaviors in free-flying big brown bats, Eptesicus fuscus, as they captured tethered and free-flying insects, in open and cluttered environments. We also studied adaptive sonar behavior in bats trained to track moving targets from a resting position. In each of these experiments, bats adjusted the features of their calls to separate target and clutter. Under many task conditions, flying bats produced prominent sonar sound groups identified as clusters of echolocation pulses with relatively stable intervals, surrounded by longer pulse intervals. In experiments where bats tracked approaching targets from a resting position, bats also produced sonar sound groups, and the prevalence of these sonar sound groups increased when motion of the target was unpredictable. We hypothesize that sonar sound groups produced during flight, and the sonar call doublets produced by a bat tracking a target from a resting position, help the animal resolve dynamic target location and represent the echo scene in greater detail. Collectively, our data reveal adaptive temporal control over sonar call production that allows the bat to negotiate a complex and dynamic environment.

On‐the‐fly generation and rendering of infinite cities on the GPU

AbstractIn this paper, we present a new approach for shape‐grammar‐based generation and rendering of huge cities in real‐time on the graphics processing unit (GPU). Traditional approaches rely on evaluating a shape grammar and storing the geometry produced as a preprocessing step. During rendering, the pregenerated data is then streamed to the GPU. By interweaving generation and rendering, we overcome the problems and limitations of streaming pregenerated data. Using our methods of visibility pruning and adaptive level of detail, we are able to dynamically generate only the geometry needed to render the current view in real‐time directly on the GPU. We also present a robust and efficient way to dynamically update a scene's derivation tree and geometry, enabling us to exploit frame‐to‐frame coherence. Our combined generation and rendering is significantly faster than all previous work. For detailed scenes, we are capable of generating geometry more rapidly than even just copying pregenerated data from main memory, enabling us to render cities with thousands of buildings at up to 100 frames per second, even with the camera moving at supersonic speed.

Deformable polygonal agents in crowd simulation

ABSTRACTTo produce impressive virtual worlds, real‐time crowd simulations require large and detailed scenes populated by agents with complex shapes and geometry. For efficiency reasons, these agents are usually approximated by point‐like representations to optimize the performances of collision avoidance and interactions between agents. This paper addresses the issue of handling deformable polygonal agents with arbitrary shapes in real time crowd simulations. The proposed multiresolution framework supports environments with arbitrary topologies and provides tools for efficient proximity queries. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Out‐of‐Core Construction of Sparse Voxel Octrees

AbstractVoxel‐based rendering has recently received significant attention due to its potential in the context of efficiently rendering massively large and highly detailed scenes. Unfortunately, few scenes are available in the form of sparse voxel octrees. In this paper, we present an out‐of‐core algorithm for constructing a sparse voxel octree from a triangle mesh. Our algorithm allows the input triangle mesh, the output sparse voxel octree and, most importantly, the intermediate high‐resolution 3D voxel grid, to be larger than available memory. We demonstrate that our out‐of‐core algorithm can construct sparse voxel octrees from triangle meshes using only a fraction of the memory required by an in‐core algorithm in roughly the same time, and that our out‐of‐core algorithm can also handle extremely large triangle meshes.

Emotion modulates eye movement patterns and subsequent memory for the gist and details of movie scenes

A basic question in vision research regards where people look in complex scenes and how this influences their performance in various tasks. Previous studies with static images have demonstrated a close link between where people look and what they remember. Here, we examined the pattern of eye movements when participants watched neutral and emotional clips from Hollywood-style movies. Participants answered multiple-choice memory questions concerning visual and auditory scene details immediately upon viewing 1-min-long neutral or emotional movie clips. Fixations were more narrowly focused for emotional clips, and immediate memory for object details was worse compared to matched neutral scenes, implying preferential attention to emotional events. Although we found the expected correlation between where people looked and what they remembered for neutral clips, this relationship broke down for emotional clips. When participants were subsequently presented with key frames (static images) extracted from the movie clips such that presentation duration of the target objects (TOs) corresponding to the multiple-choice questions was matched and the earlier questions were repeated, more fixations were observed on the TOs, and memory performance also improved significantly, confirming that emotion modulates the relationship between gaze position and memory performance. Finally, in a long-term memory test, old/new recognition performance was significantly better for emotional scenes as compared to neutral scenes. Overall, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that emotional content draws eye fixations and strengthens memory for the scene gist while weakening encoding of peripheral scene details.

Sophie’s Terrible Twos by Rosemary Wells (review)

Reviewed by: Sophie’s Terrible Twos by Rosemary Wells Amy Atkinson Wells, Rosemary. Sophie’s Terrible Twos; and illus. by Rosemary Wells. Viking, 2014. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-670-78512-4 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 2-4 yrs. It’s Sophie’s second birthday, and the terrible twos are right on schedule. She doesn’t want to wear her pink dress (“No pink!”), her new fairy wings won’t fly, and her breakfast blueberry pancakes are inedible (“Sophie didn’t like to eat two things mixed together”). Luckily for both Sophie and her increasingly vexed parents, Granny knows just what to do. In this charming return appearance of her latest rodent heroine, Wells captures the good, bad, and ugly of being a two-year old with accurate specifics and amusing readaloud phrasing (“I know someone who has turned the corner onto Grumpy Street,” says Sophie’s mother). Watercolors, ink, and gouache lend themselves well to contained but highly detailed scenes, where the personalities of central characters and mere passersby alike vividly emerge, particularly through their nuanced sartorial choices. Wells’ sweet but smart drawings flesh out the well-paced text and provide additional humor, as when Sophie’s blocks stray into the page gutter during one of her temper tantrums. The size and detail of the pictures make this a good lap read, with plenty to talk about with those young readers who will sympathize with Sophie and covet her winning birthday present—in a lovely nod to Max and his wolf suit, a sabretooth tiger costume that displays the wild thing within every toddler. [End Page 384] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

On-the-fly multi-scale infinite texturing from example

In computer graphics, rendering visually detailed scenes is often achieved through texturing. We propose a method for on-the-fly non-periodic infinite texturing of surfaces based on a single image. Pattern repetition is avoided by defining patches within each texture whose content can be changed at runtime. In addition, we consistently manage multi-scale using one input image per represented scale. Undersampling artifacts are avoided by accounting for fine-scale features while colors are transferred between scales. Eventually, we allow for relief-enhanced rendering and provide a tool for intuitive creation of height maps. This is done using an ad-hoc local descriptor that measures feature self-similarity in order to propagate height values provided by the user for a few selected texels only. Thanks to the patch-based system, manipulated data are compact and our texturing approach is easy to implement on GPU. The multi-scale extension is capable of rendering finely detailed textures in real-time.

Scene-Based Adaptive Iteration Bad Pixel Dynamic Correction Algorithm for Infrared Focal Plane Arrays

Infrared focal plane array (IRFPA) bad pixel correction as a prevalent problem is widely used in complex conditions. Therefore, scene-based adaptive iteration bad pixel dynamic correction algorithm is proposed and explored. Adaptive filtering bad pixel detection algorithm is to record the intensity of an image and replace the intensity of the image filtered by a locally acting adaptive filter. Using the intensity of the unfiltered and filtered image to determined the bad pixel which regarded as image noise. By the improved Nagao filtering bad pixel compensation algorithm, filtering sub-windows with the same pixel amount whose patterns are decided by the texture analysis can obtain stronger directivity. Thus, the image boundary pixels do not reappear as flicking dot during the quick scene changes, and the rich scene details are preserved.

Task dependent memory recall performance of naturalistic scenes: Incidental memorization during search outperforms intentional scene memorization

Memorizing critical objects and their locations is an essential part of everyday life. In the present study, incidental encoding of objects in scenes during search was compared to explicit memorization of those scenes. Participants were shown 10 different, indoor scenes. 150 objects (15/scene) were preselected. Regions of interest were defined around each object for eye tracking analysis. Observers searched for ten objects in each of five scenes (50 trials, mean RT=3550ms). For the other five scenes, observers spent 15 seconds memorizing as much as possible of each scene for later recall (task order and scenes assignments counterbalanced). We subsequently tested explicit scene memory in two ways. Global scene representation / boundary extension was assessed by showing observers previously-presented scenes and asking if the scene was closer-up or further away than the “original”. Detailed scene memory was assessed by asking participants to redraw each of the 10 scenes and their objects. We found no indication of boundary extension for these complex, indoor scenes. Inferences about the scene beyond the image border did not become part of scene memory. Overall, a rather small percentage of the objects were subsequently drawn. Interestingly, even though participants in the search condition were not explicitly asked to memorize the scenes, they reproduced a substantially greater number of objects (22%) compared to the memory condition (11%). This advantage was produced by 29% recall of search targets, which received highest gaze durations (2600ms). Only 9% of all distractors were recalled despite mean gaze durations of 1730ms. Objects in the memorize condition were only looked at for 700ms, but 11% of these objects were recalled suggesting differential, task-dependent encoding strategies. Instructions to search for specific objects produced stronger encoding than the general request to memorize the scene even though the critical objects were repeatedly fixated in both conditions.

Scene reconstruction from high spatio-angular resolution light fields

This paper describes a method for scene reconstruction of complex, detailed environments from 3D light fields. Densely sampled light fields in the order of 10 9 light rays allow us to capture the real world in unparalleled detail, but efficiently processing this amount of data to generate an equally detailed reconstruction represents a significant challenge to existing algorithms. We propose an algorithm that leverages coherence in massive light fields by breaking with a number of established practices in image-based reconstruction. Our algorithm first computes reliable depth estimates specifically around object boundaries instead of interior regions, by operating on individual light rays instead of image patches. More homogeneous interior regions are then processed in a fine-to-coarse procedure rather than the standard coarse-to-fine approaches. At no point in our method is any form of global optimization performed. This allows our algorithm to retain precise object contours while still ensuring smooth reconstructions in less detailed areas. While the core reconstruction method handles general unstructured input, we also introduce a sparse representation and a propagation scheme for reliable depth estimates which make our algorithm particularly effective for 3D input, enabling fast and memory efficient processing of "Gigaray light fields" on a standard GPU. We show dense 3D reconstructions of highly detailed scenes, enabling applications such as automatic segmentation and image-based rendering, and provide an extensive evaluation and comparison to existing image-based reconstruction techniques.

Dense scene reconstruction with points of interest

We present an approach to detailed reconstruction of complex real-world scenes with a handheld commodity range sensor. The user moves the sensor freely through the environment and images the scene. An offline registration and integration pipeline produces a detailed scene model. To deal with the complex sensor trajectories required to produce detailed reconstructions with a consumer-grade sensor, our pipeline detects points of interest in the scene and preserves detailed geometry around them while a global optimization distributes residual registration errors through the environment. Our results demonstrate that detailed reconstructions of complex scenes can be obtained with a consumer-grade camera.

Music visualization-based game design and research

With reference to the creation of the independent game StarMusiX,this paper provided a new method of designing game scenes in order to solve such problems as high cost and low efficiency in development and production of game scenes.The method is that external data was analyzed in real-time and the result was recognized as the driving factors of real-time game scenes building,meanwhile the details of game scenes were generated by program.In the experimental game,scenes can be generated by inputting and analyzing "music-data" and a full expression can be found in "music-visualization".This verifies the rationality and feasibility of the above methods.The experimental results indicate that the method effectively improves the efficiency of game scenes design.

GPU-Based Local Tone Mapping in the Context of Virtual Night Driving

Virtual prototyping of automotive headlights requires a realistic illumination model, capable of rendering scenes of high contrast in fine detail. Due to the high dynamic range (HDR) nature of headlight beam-pattern data, which is projected onto the virtual road, high dynamic range illumination models are required. These are used as the basis for illumination in simulations for automotive headlight virtual prototyping. Since high dynamic range illumination models operate on brightness ranges commensurate with the real world, a postprocessing operation, known as tone mapping, is required to map each frame into the device-specific range of the display hardware. Algorithms for tone mapping, called tone-mapping operators, can be classified as global or local. Global operators are efficient to compute at the expense of scene quality. Local operators preserve scene detail, but, due to their additional computational complexity, are rarely used with interactive applications. Local tone-mapping methods produce more usable visualization results for engineering tasks. This paper proposes a local tone-mapping method suitable for use with interactive applications. To develop a suitable tone-mapping operator, a state of the art local tone-mapping method was accelerated using modern, work-efficient GPU (graphics processing unit) algorithms. Optimal performance, both in terms of memory and speed, was achieved by means of general-purpose GPU programming with CUDA (compute unified device architecture). A prototypic implementation has shown that the method works well with high dynamic range OpenGL applications. In the near future, the tone mapper will be integrated into the virtual night driving simulator at our institute.

Stuart Henderson, Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s.

Stuart Henderson, Making Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in 1960s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011, 384pp. $70.00 cloth (978-1-4426-4152-5) Stuart Henderson's Making Scene details history of Toronto's Yorkville district and surrounds from early 1960s to decade's close, presenting a rich variety of contemporary and retrospective depictions woven together with more general ruminations upon nature of place, performance, and projection onto screen of wider popular culture that was, at time, Canada's preeminent neighbourhood. Henderson seeks to destabilize pat narratives of the sixties in general and Yorkville scene in particular. The tight geographic focus furnishes a welcome opportunity. In questioning set types according to which cast of characters in rehearsed version are identified, and in considering range of social groups that cohabited (however fractiously) in limited, albeit symbolically dynamic, space of a handful of square blocks near downtown Toronto, Henderson is able to present an unusually full illustration. The author's stated interest in displacing presumptively white, male, heterosexual, middle-class star of pat narrative (and therefore to shake up a sort of synecdoche in interpretation), is manifest in treatment of various currents of identity simultaneously vying for a place in Yorkville scene. In this, book should be received as welcome addition in same vein as recent works such as Sean Mills' 2010 The Empire Within (both, incidentally, are published fruits of dissertation work undertaken in Department of History at Queen's University). Alongside analysis of performances of hip identity associated with more familiar protagonists, both authentic full-time hippie and outer suburb or Rosedale weekender, particular attention is granted to greaser subculture among working-class and immigrant youth--a group whose apparently ubiquitous presence is oddly paired with one-dimensional depictions and outright effacements which Henderson attempts to counteract with forays into history of local churchmen's youth outreach efforts and other available sources. Although certainly not first to do so, his efforts seek to address often secondary nature of female perspectives, and to consider failings of sexual revolution. He further traces early significance of scene with reference to an emergent homosexual community, biker identity, and not-so-hip political activists including such recognizable figures as June Callwood, David DePoe, and Clayton Ruby, and proprietors and operators of district's various businesses and outreach services, from owners of shops and galleries to Christian missionaries and health-services workers. The subject matter offers significant grist for thinking on nature of urban cultural scenes, and indeed character of colourful or transgressive spaces as a pole of attraction for an increasing array of subjects in latter half of 20th century. Early on, Henderson traces how attempts at fashioning of a Yorkville brand give way to struggles over maintenance of a distinction between and bohemia. Assertions by erstwhile cultural entrepreneurs and chic merchants that the goal of a visit to Yorkville is exploration and discovery,' (p. 58), experience of a place suffused with sophistication and possibilities of aesthetic pleasure and culturally astute acquisition, merge uncomfortably with its burgeoning status as a site for unorthodox cultural performances. While first group seeks to avoid taint of association with youthful disorders, some trace of affinity marks apparent opposition of chic and countercultural--precedent, perhaps, for valorization of places offering experiential variety and edge intrinsic to contemporary iterations of creative city animated by hip consumerism. …

Almost a Memoir

Almost a Memoir Jennie Berner (bio) The Tattered Lion: Stories of a Man through the Eyes of a Woman. Juana Culhane. Spuyten Duyvil. http://www.spuytenduyvil.net. 134 pages; paper, $14.00. Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Cover Many of the stories collected in Juana Culhane’s The Tattered Lion are not exactly new, having appeared in Bird on the Wing (2011), The Celestial Monster (2008), or The Revelations of Dr. Purcell (1992). Culhane manages to make them new, however, by reframing them as something almost like a memoir. All fourteen stories, while fiction, are “influenced or haunted” by her late husband, the renowned artist and animator Shamus Culhane, whom she affectionately calls her “tattered lion.” Together, they are meant to “paint a portrait” of him and of part of their nearly forty-year relationship. Most of the stories follow two characters, Joanna and James (ciphers for Juana and Shamus, whose birthname was James), through the highs and lows of their life together: from their first encounter in an elevator to their last moments on his deathbed, from their trial separation to their eventual reunion, from the passions and insecurities of youth to the ravages and realizations of old age. What is perhaps most striking—and interesting—about the collection, however, is the way in which it ultimately fails to provide a clear portrait of either a man or a marriage. Despite a number of references to James’s career, his fascination with Mayan archaeology and Greek myth, the exotic trips he took with Joanna, and the smaller pleasures (say, a favorite Japanese restaurant) they enjoyed closer to home in New York, Culhane often flattens or avoids details of character, scene, and backstory. In lieu of these details, she offers a narrative strangely compelled by abstractions: desire and disappointment, jealousy and forgiveness, joy and grief, identity and disintegration, art and illusion. The collection begins at the end, in effect, with “Cave of the Patriarchs,” a story that stages a quarrel between three deceased patriarchs—father, father-in-law, and second husband—over one absent (and presumably living) woman, Rosa, symbolized by a red rose withering away at the foot of their cave. Each patriarch is invested in Rosa for a different reason: her father wants her to be his protégé, her father-in-law wants her to be his lover, and her second husband (James) wants her to prove she loves only him. In keeping with its mythical quality, the story eventually resolves with the realization that the quarrel over Rosa is futile—each man already has what he really needs. Instantly, the rose regains its strength. Of course, the fact that the story is set in the afterlife suggests that this kind of resolution was not achieved in life itself. Indeed, many of the subsequent stories in The Tattered Lion show how Joanna is implicated in similar conflicts right up to—and even beyond—James’s death. In particular, Culhane continually returns to the problem—and repercussions—of James’s jealousy and possessiveness. In “Stone Rubbings,” a visit to a site of Mayan ruins is overshadowed by the sudden news that Joanna’s father has died—news that triggers James’s own fears of abandonment. Initially, he scolds her for wanting to leave for the funeral: “You’re acting as if you’ve lost the one and only love of your life!” Though he immediately apologizes for his outburst, he betrays his jealousy again later, albeit in an altered form: “I’ll bet there isn’t one person who hasn’t loved doing this to you,” he remarks while they are making love. In this and other stories, James’s jealousy emerges, paradoxically, as both unfounded and justifiable. On the one hand, the collection offers no real evidence of Joanna’s unfaithfulness to James—aside from a one-night stand during their separation, she seems to have been a loyal wife. On the other hand, she continually doubts her desires and intentions, wondering, for instance, if she really was too attached to her father growing up, and if it is possible that her heart does not belong entirely to James. This self-doubt emerges...

On filtering the noise from the random parameters in Monte Carlo rendering

Monte Carlo (MC) rendering systems can produce spectacular images but are plagued with noise at low sampling rates. In this work, we observe that this noise occurs in regions of the image where the sample values are a direct function of the random parameters used in the Monte Carlo system. Therefore, we propose a way to identify MC noise by estimating this functional relationship from a small number of input samples. To do this, we treat the rendering system as a black box and calculate the statistical dependency between the outputs and inputs of the system. We then use this information to reduce the importance of the sample values affected by MC noise when applying an image-space, cross-bilateral filter, which removes only the noise caused by the random parameters but preserves important scene detail. The process of using the functional relationships between sample values and the random parameter inputs to filter MC noise is called Random Parameter Filtering (RPF), and we demonstrate that it can produce images in a few minutes that are comparable to those rendered with a thousand times more samples. Furthermore, our algorithm is general because we do not assign any physical meaning to the random parameters, so it works for a wide range of Monte Carlo effects, including depth of field, area light sources, motion blur, and path-tracing. We present results for still images and animated sequences at low sampling rates that have higher quality than those produced with previous approaches.