Tattoo Image Research Articles

Embodied memories - exploring memorial tattoos through the lens of terror management theory

Objectives To delve into the phenomenon of memorial tattoos in Israel following the October 7, 2023, massacre, and the ensuing Iron Swords War utilizing Terror Management Theory. Methodology A qualitative approach employing digital ethnography and visual content analysis was adopted to scrutinize 250 war tattoo images sourced from Israeli tattoo artists’ Instagram pages and Facebook groups. Data collection spanned the initial four months of the war, from October 2023 to January 2024. Findings and conclusions The analysis highlights existential anxieties stemming from the massacre and ongoing conflict, which are both reflected and addressed through the tattoos’ content and meaning. Memorial tattoos serve as responses to mortality salience, depicting themes that adhere to the three anxiety-buffer mechanisms proposed by the theory: reinforcement of collective worldviews; enhancement of self-esteem; and seeking continued attachment relationships. Through these mechanisms, tattoo recipients invest efforts in giving meaning to the inconceivable events and their ongoing grief.

Eds.) Micaela Latini, Elena Tavani, Connected Images: New Paradigms for Aesthetic Experience Paradigmi, Rivista di Critica Filosofica, XLI, 3/2023.

Performativity, connection, aggregate, conflict, Stimmung and artificial intelligence are among the topics chosen by the authors of the monographic issue of scientific journal Paradigmi, Rivista di Critica Filosofica dedicated to Connected images: New Paradigms for Aesthetic Experience, edited by Micaela Latini and Elena Tavani. Numerous contemporary and transdisciplinary forms of interpretation represent aesthetic experience in this Issue. It approaches the art world with Nature and the images naturally created by animals and natural environments (Tavani), the body in motion and its intentionality represented by images (Alloa, Benjamin), the body and time in tattoo images (Vercellone), the biological world and molecular discoveries (Bredekamp), furniture objects and the image of aesthetic experience they suggest (Goehr), political and social conflicts and what they represent (Latini), and pictures of music (Pangrazi). The last essays follow this mainly focused on the digital context, artificial intelligence and the technological impact on the art world and of chiasmus in images (Diodato), political rhetoric (Fimiani), surreal image interventions in the world of artificial intelligence (Somaini) and identity and the constitution of algorithms (Eugeni).

Research on the Application of Artificial Intelligence Technology in the Digital Processing of Traditional Visual Art Elements

Abstract The digital era has brought unprecedented convenience and prosperity to art design. This project develops the application of artificial intelligence technology from the digitalization process of traditional visual art elements in two dimensions: image enhancement and image recognition. Combining the quantile algorithm and adaptive gamma correction technology, we have designed an image enhancement method based on AGC-Quantile for traditional elements. Based on the classification model of the MobileNet network and the target detection model based on YOLOv5, the traditional element image recognition model is proposed. Traditional element images containing multiple types of tattoos are selected as experimental objects, and the actual performance of this model is investigated through algorithm comparison and evaluation index analysis. The AGC-Quantile method processes different tattoo images with high quality and outperforms the comparison algorithms in different indexes (MSE>17, PSNR>23, and SSIM>0.82). The classification model based on the MobileNet network and the target detection model based on YOLOv5 is proposed to enhance traditional element images. -YOLOv5 has a classification accuracy and target detection accuracy of 83.2% and 87.6%, respectively, and improves 65.82% in time. According to the experiment, the AI-based model constructed in this paper has superior image enhancement and image recognition effects and can be utilized for the digitization of traditional visual art elements.

Literacies in everyday life: Tattoo information needs

This paper identifies the information needs of individuals in the process of tattoo acquisition and discusses those needs in relation to information literacy skills that support tattoo information experience. Findings of 21 interviews with participants in Aotearoa New Zealand show that for a successful tattoo information experience, people need to engage with information to find a tattoo image, select and communicate their needs and negotiate with artists, mitigate health and safety risks, understand tattoo-related rights and appropriateness, capture and share their experience, and present their identity in social settings. Seven categories of information needs emerged supported by accompanying literacies under the overarching category of Information Needs (Information Literacy): Health Information Needs (Health Literacy), Visual Information Needs (Visual Literacy), Legal Information Needs (Legal Literacy), Cultural Information Needs (Cultural Literacy), Societal Information Needs (Societal Literacy), Digital and Media Information Needs (Digital and Media Literacy). Although just briefly mentioned by our participants, there was an indication of Financial Information Needs (Financial Literacy). Information literacy in the workplace and formal learning contexts has been well-researched. Still, there is an opportunity to focus more on literacies in everyday life, and tattoos present such an opportunity with significant contribution to individuals, tattoo artists and communities.

Tattoo information creation: Towards a holistic understanding of tattoo information experience

The tattoo information experience reveals possibilities to explore how tattoo images are created as things, what actions lead to the creation of a tattoo image, who is considered a creator of a tattoo image, and how different personal, social and cultural contexts influence creation of information through the tattoo acquisition experience. Based on the findings from nine interviews, the process of tattoo information creation was conceptualized encompassing all stages of the tattoo experience: from the moment the first idea of getting a tattoo emerges to sharing of information about a tattoo. Participants' stories about their tattoo experiences were used to develop a framework of four key phases of tattoo information creation: conceptualizing, verbalizing, visualizing, and pluralizing. These phases occur between four anchors identified in the participants' stories: anticipation, identification, ideation, and creation. This framework can be used to assist future empirical and theoretical research on tattoo information experience.

The Self-Image of Tattooed Women within the Social Interaction Space in the Society

This scientific paper discusses how tattoo edwomen interact in social life with the majority of people having a negative view of tattoo images. Atattooed woman interacts socially and culturally. It is in this social space that she negotiates with her social world, in various ways, such as allowing the tattoo image on her body to be openly seen, or she tries to cover it up when the woman considers negative or positive views of the tattoo images on some parts of her body The approach used to understand tattooed women's interactions with their social life was the Looking Glass Self proposed by Charles Horton Cooley, which discusses how the looking glass self analogy affects the developmnet of a person's self-concept. Thiswas a qualitative study designedto answer the problem of how tattooed women interact with their socio-cultural world which has positive and negative views. Qualitative method of a tattooed woman life story was applied to explore experiences regarding their social interactions. This study involved 3 case studies to answer such problem. This study found that there were different negotiation processes between a tattooed woman andanother, alongwithdifferent cases of tattoo image ownership.

PEREMPUAN BERTATO (STUDI MAKNA SIMBOLIK TATO DI KOTA MAKASSAR)

This study aims to determinan (1)the factors that cause womwn to use tattoos. (2) The symbolic meaning of tattoo images in tattoed women.This type of research is qualitatiive by determining the subject through the snowball sampling technique. The date collection techniques used were observation, interview and documentation, which were used to obtain concrete data related to problem in this study. The date obtained in this study were analyzed with qualitative descriptive analysis.The results of the study indicate that: (1). The factors that cause tattooed women to use tattoos include: a) internal factors, including interests and self-expression. b) external factors, including the enironment and idol figures. (2). The symbolic meaning of tattoo images in tattooed women include: a) as hope, b) as expression, c) as identity.

A portrait photo-to-tattoo transform based on digital tattooing

Tattooing portraits of loved ones is a popular form of love expression and tribute. Tattooing portraits is complicated and challenging because of detailed facial expressions and unique characters of each person. Currently, it is hard for clients to give clear instructions on tattoo designs to tattooists, because there is no effective way to see a portrait tattoo before putting it on the body. In this paper, an algorithm which transforms a given portrait photo to a portrait tattoo is proposed. It takes a portrait photo, a reference portrait tattoo image, a skin image and a set of parameters as inputs. The portrait photo is the person’s face whom the client wants to put on his/her skin. The reference portrait tattoo image is used to control the color and style of the synthetic portrait tattoo. The skin image is taken from the skin region where the client wants to tattoo. By adjusting the parameters, portrait tattoos with different characteristics can be generated. The proposed algorithm uses a series of tailor-made image processing methods and a digital tattoo needle model to perform digital tattooing on the skin image. Comparing with the state-of-the-art style transfer methods, the proposed algorithm produces more realistic portrait tattoos.

대학생의 유행선도력에 따른 타투인식과 타투행동

This study provides the basic data required for actively responding to tattoo customers’ needs by analyzing the tattoo perception and tattooing behavior by fashion leadership among college students in their 20s. For this, a questionnaire survey was conducted among college students in Busan in June and September 2019. A total of 317 questionnaires were used for the analysis, and the following results were obtained. First, fashion leadership was comprised of fashion innovation, fashion opinion leadership, and fashion information search, while the perception of tattoos consisted of interest, personality, safety, and image. Depending on the fashion leadership, the subjects were classified as a fashion-dual leader, fashion follower, and fashion laggard. In contrast, the interest in tattoos, focus on tattoo images, and non-interest in tattoos were obtained depending on the perception of tattoos. Second, the perception of tattoos revealed differences depending on fashion leadership. Interest in tattoos was highest among fashion-dual leaders with positive thinking. In contrast, it was lowest among fashion-late adopters. In other words, interest in tattoos was mostly high among trendsetting college students. In terms of personality, fashion dual leaders and followers believe that having a tattoo makes them look different, stylish, and conspicuous. Concerning tattoo images, fashion followers concluded that tattoos influence a person’s image while fashion-late adopters did not agree with this perception.

The impact of personal perception on the identification of tattoo pattern in human identification

Tattoos and body modifications have a significant role to play in the identification of individuals in a variety of forensic contexts. Despite this, little work has explicitly examined this topic. The aim of this study was to examine whether personal perception has an influence on the identification of tattoo images. A questionnaire was constructed containing a variety of tattoo images and distributed randomly, resulting in two hundred and eleven participant responses. The results indicated that the perception of tattoos has a high margin for error and interpretation. The conclusion of the study argues that a perception issue exists amongst individuals, however further work needs to be carried out to establish the degree of variation.

Tattoo Image Search at Scale: Joint Detection and Compact Representation Learning.

The explosive growth of digital images in video surveillance and social media has led to the significant need for efficient search of persons of interest in law enforcement and forensic applications. Despite tremendous progress in primary biometric traits (e.g., face and fingerprint) based person identification, a single biometric trait alone can not meet the desired recognition accuracy in forensic scenarios. Tattoos, as one of the important soft biometric traits, have been found to be valuable for assisting in person identification. However, tattoo search in a large collection of unconstrained images remains a difficult problem, and existing tattoo search methods mainly focus on matching cropped tattoos, which is different from real application scenarios. To close the gap, we propose an efficient tattoo search approach that is able to learn tattoo detection and compact representation jointly in a single convolutional neural network (CNN) via multi-task learning. While the features in the backbone network are shared by both tattoo detection and compact representation learning, individual latent layers of each sub-network optimize the shared features toward the detection and feature learning tasks, respectively. We resolve the small batch size issue inside the joint tattoo detection and compact representation learning network via random image stitch and preceding feature buffering. We evaluate the proposed tattoo search system using multiple public-domain tattoo benchmarks, and a gallery set with about 300K distracter tattoo images compiled from these datasets and images from the Internet. In addition, we also introduce a tattoo sketch dataset containing 300 tattoos for sketch-based tattoo search. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has superior performance in tattoo detection and tattoo search at scale compared to several state-of-the-art tattoo retrieval algorithms.

Enhanced Tattoo Image Quality Assessment Through Multispectral Sensing

The impact of using tattoo images in biometrics and forensics-related applications for human identification or in the case of ruling out suspects has been significantly increased in recent years. The NIST Tatt-C and Tatt-E biometric tattoo challenges have focused on pushing forward tattoo related research in terms of human identification, detection, localization, and sketch-matching. However, current tattoo research has been limited to the use of the visible wavelengths (380-750 nm) when imaging tattoo skin regions. Variations in skin pigments, ink colors, and ink types make the imaging of tattoos inherently challenging when operating in a conventional band only. For example, enhanced imaging techniques are needed to improve the contrast between skin and tattoo regions in individuals with darker skin pigment or in instances where the ink color is close to the skin pigment. In this article, we propose the use of various wavelengths within the shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectrum that provide enhanced tattoo imaging and, as a result, an enhanced human identification capability. First, we performed a data collection process that resulted in the generation of a large scale database of visible and SWIR tattoo images for 133 subjects (Session 1) with 80 subjects coming back for a second round of data collection (Session 2). Furthermore, we conducted an empirical study using various skin pigments (determined via known ethnic group meta data) and when image quality varies within and across different SWIR wavelengths. Experimental results indicate that specific SWIR wavelengths, namely the range between 1100 nm and 1300 nm, show superior tattoo image quality in the majority of the ethnic groups studied, except one (i.e., Asian group). To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to bring forward the benefits of tattoo imaging outside the visible band for the purpose of human identification.

Evidence of negative implicit attitudes toward individuals with a tattoo near the face

Three studies examined if people express negative implicit attitudes toward individuals with a tattoo near the face. In Study 1, participants who completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) expressed moderately negative implicit attitudes toward individuals with a tribal tattoo on one side of the neck. Study 2 replicated Study 1 when the tattoo was symmetrical, suggesting that negative affect, and not processing fluency, underlies the implicit negative evaluation of individuals with a tribal tattoo near the face. Study 3 showed dissociation between explicit and implicit attitudes toward individuals with a tribal tattoo near the face, and that the negative implicit evaluation was attenuated if the tattoo image was an objectively positive symbol. The implications for displaying a tattoo near the face are discussed.

Robust Keypoint Detection Using Higher-Order Scale Space Derivatives: Application to Image Retrieval

Image retrieval has been extensively studied over the last two decades due to the increasing demands for the effective use of multimedia data. Among various approaches to image retrieval, scale space representation and local keypoint descriptors have been shown to be a promising approach. Even though the concept of scale space representation has been known for a long time, it has now gained prominence as a powerful method for image retrieval mostly due to the invention of the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). We will review the characteristics of the scale space operation and provide an extended method of scale space operation that significantly improves the image matching accuracy in the context of image retrieval. We use an operational tattoo image database containing 1,000 near duplicate images to show the superior retrieval performance of the proposed method compared to SIFT keypoints.

자아존중감 유형에 따른 타투이미지와 외모만족도 연구

The present study analyzed the tattoo image and body satisfaction according to the self-esteem. The samples were consisted of 191 female college students located in Kyunggi-do. The survey was implemented during may~july, 2012. Data were analyzed by frequency, factor analysis, cluster analysis, ANOVA, t-test, CPA, and Duncan-test. The results are as follows. Significant difference about tattoo image and body satisfaction was found in the group divided by the self-esteem. 'Individual personality' group had a tendency to be higher level than other group about appearance satisfaction and to be better image about Tattoo. 'Ego-centrism' group showed low level about good image of Tattoo. However, that group more satisfied their appearances than other groups. 'passive management' group showed lower level than other group about positive Tattoo image-building.

Tattoo Image Matching and Retrieval

An automated tattoo image matching system achieves significantly better results for forensic and law enforcement applications than traditional keyword-based matching.

Image Retrieval in Forensics: Tattoo Image Database Application

In this article, we took an unsupervised approach in designing appropriate similarity measures to explicitly address the challenge arising from low-quality tattoo image matching. In the future, we plan to improve the matching algorithm by exploring both super- vised and semisupervised learning algorithms. Besides tattoos, other types of soft forensic evidence can be collected and managed in the form of images, such as shoe prints and gang graffiti images. Although Tattoo-ID focuses on tattoo image matching and retrieval, the underlying techniques developed in the Tattoo-ID system can be adopted to other forensic image databases.15 Other types of soft forensic image evidence might include shoeprints and gang graffiti images. In the future, we plan to extend the Tattoo-ID system to different application domains.

Skin optical clearing for improvement of laser tattoo removal

The possibility of improvement of laser tattoo removal due to the optical clearing of human skin is investigated. It is shown experimentally that previously perforation of skin stratum corneum allows increasing tattoo image contrast at topical administration of immersion agent in contrast with non-perforated skin. Computer Monte Carlo simulation shows that at the optical clearing of upper skin layers the tattoo image contrast and the photon fraction absorbed in the tattoo area at the depths of 0.5 or 1.0 mm increase, that allows significant decreasing of the power of laser radiation used at laser thermolysis.

Possibility of increasing the efficiency of laser-induced tattoo removal by optical skin clearing

The possibility of selective laser photothermolysis improvement for the removal of tattoo pigments due to the optical clearing of human skin is investigated. It is shown experimentally that the optical skin clearing increases the tattoo image contrast. Computer Monte Carlo simulations show that by decreasing the laser beam scattering in upper skin layers, it is possible to reduce the radiation power required for tattoo removal by 30%—40% and, therefore, to increase the the photothermolysis efficiency.