through fox talbot's window

Ground truth image sets

Ground truth image sets, including calibration images, are useful for validation of software - testing the overall ability of the software to provide realistic results with real images, under real-life conditions. Ground truth images can also be modified and used to create quasi-synthetic images for testing susceptibility of algorithms to things like motion blur, image defocus, misregistration and noise.

The synthetic generation of samples make possible experiments with thousand of subjects (same benchmark data for all researchers) without any legal concern (avoiding also the time consuming acquisition procedures). You can find biometric synthetic generation for several traits: fingerprint, face, handwritting signature, iris, palm


The Sculptures 6k Dataset consists of 6340 images images collected from Flickr by searching for sculptures by Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin. The dataset is split equally into a train and test set, each containing 3170 images. For each set 10 different Henry Moore sculptures are chosen as query objects, and for each of these objects 7 images and query regions are defined, thus providing 70 queries for performance evaluation purposes.


The scripted (and unscripted) activities include: walk, browse, slump, left object, meet, fight, window shop, shop enter, shop exit. 


Annotated biological image sets for testing and validation

trap trap trap trap trap

 wasp/ wineglass/ factum/ 2015
Caza con reclamo / goya/ prado / 1775
schady/ photosculpture/ factum 2015

okamoto taro

ansel adams zone system

0	Pure black
I	Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
II	Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
III	Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
IV	Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
V	Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood
VI	Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
VII	Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
VIII	Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
IX	Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
X	Pure white: light sources and specular reflections

Pompéi à Paris en photosculptures en 1874, 35 Boulevard des Capucines

Pompéi à Paris en photosculptures en 1874

 

La Semaine des familles écrit le 1er août 1874²⁹ :

On lit en ce moment, sur le boulevard des Capucines, une grande affiche portant ces mots : Pompéi à Paris. Voilà un programme séduisant : entrez dans la Salle des Conférence (dite Salle des Capucines) et vous pourrez constater que ce programme n'est pas menteur.

C'est bien Pompéi que vous aurez sons les yeux, — Pompéi reproduit par un procédé inusité jusqu'à ce jour. Il ne s'agit plus de la photographie, mais bien de la photosculpture appliquée à la reproduction des monuments.

Vous savez que la photosculpture est un art qui permet d'obtenir en relief l'effigie des objets avec une exactitude rigoureuse et mathématique. A l'aide de ce procédé, on a reproduit tous les principaux monuments de Pompéi : chacun des modèles ainsi exécuté a environ cinquante centimètres en hauteur et en largeur : il est en mastic.

Ce relief est colorié de façon à imiter complètement les tons de la nature vraie : on le pose devant une toile peinte qui, par une illusion d'optique, semble se confondre avec lui. Relief et toile sont placés derrière une énorme lentille grossissante.

Quand on regarde à travers cette lentille, le plan en relief prend des proportions énormes : ce n'est plus un modèle bon à mettre sur la table d'un architecte, c'est la nature elle-même dans toute sa réalité, dans ses proportions vraies. Ni le panorama, ni le diorama, ni le stéréoscope, n'atteignent à de pareils effets : on sent que l'air circule à travers les colonnes, qu'on pourrait gravir ces degrés, passer sous ces voûtes.

Je suis resté une grande heure à errer de la Maison du poète tragique au Temple d'Isis et du Grand Cirque à la Rue d'Herculanum... J'étais à quatre cents lieues de Paris, et à vingt siècles en arrière.

Quand, enfin, je suis ressorti sur le boulevard des Capucines, c'est pour le coup que je me suis cru le jouet d'une illusion : il m'a fallu un effort pour me rappeler que j'étais bien un Parisien de l'an 1874, et pour ne pas me trouver un peu plus dépaysé devant le perron de Tortoni que je ne l'étais tout à l'heure devant le Panthéon de la ville antique.

"Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii" was the most popular American sculpture of the nineteenth century. According to Rogers, it was replicated 167 times in two sizes. The subject was drawn from "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), a widely read novel by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which ends with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a.d. 79. 

photoscan

TAG on Sea 2013

Seeing, Thinking, Doing: Visualisation as Archaeological Research

strangely active fossils

It is as if the past surfaces in itself but in the shape of personalities which are independent, alienated, off-balance, in some sense embryonic, strangely active fossils, radioactive, inexplicable in the present where they surface, and all the more harmful and autonomous.   Deleuze 1989 /123

fossil/ foto / fetish

geological photograph / material quality of memory

There are a number of radioactive elements that occur in nature. In some cases, these can be deposited in fossil and subfossil specimens, causing the specimens to become radioactive. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials are generally not subject to regulation and these specimens do not emit enough radiation to have harmful effects on the timescales that are usually involved in the workplace. Nonetheless, it is important to be aware of the potential for radioactivity in fossils and take steps to avoid unnecessary exposure. Specimens of unknown origin should have their mineral components identified by scientific analytical methods; radioactive samples can also be identified using Geiger counter.   paleo portal

mesh

wsa photosculpture apparatus @ csm

Many of the mechanical monsters produced in the nineteenth century still sur­vive today-machines without a nervous system of their own, constantly requiring the assistance of a human partner. Developments in the use of electricity, and above all the rise of electrOniCS, taking place less than a century after the mutation that pro­duced automotive machines, have triggered another mutation that leaves but little in the human organism still to be exteriorized. Machines have changed radically as a result of the development of small-scale motors, photosensitive cells, transistors, and miniaturized devices of all kinds. This disparate arsenal is supplying the parts for a composite body strangely similar to the biological one. Whereas nineteenth­ century machines with their voluminous energy sources conducted a single force to blindly acting organs via extensive transmission systems, today's machinery with its multiple sources of energy is leading to something like a real muscular system, con­ trolled by a real nervous system, performing complex operating programs through its connections with something like a real sensory-motor brain.

Leroi-Gorhan / Gesture & Speech

blurg

time travel// parallel photography

one moment /// many points of view
reversed panopticon
the crowd executes the sovereign
a revolutionary device


“The idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings – concealed in its own form – an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) , every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others… The idea is a monad – that means briefly: every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.”
Benjamin encapsulates his monadological theory in a famous astronomical metaphor: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”. The constellation becomes Benjamin’s term for the configuration or network of ideas that create, so to speak, a holographic image (an “abbreviation”) of the world in its entirety. His subsequent career was to be devoted to mapping such constellations. 
 ...
The constellation became the “dialectical image”, a view of history reachable only from a particular perspective, in much the same way that a stellar constellation such as Orion can take the form we see, only when viewed from our own planet at this particular time (since its stars are actually unrelated, lying at very different distances from Earth, and are all in motion with respect to each other). The image is “dialectical” in the sense of our engagement with it: we actively bring it into being, and the knowledge it produces can bring about change. Despite the apparent idealism of Benjamin’s theory, the constellation or dialectical image remains an abbreviation of objective fact and historical truth. Leibniz had already expressed something like this in Monadology (1714): "And just as the same town when seen from different sides will seem quite different, and as it were multiplied perspectivally, the same thing happens here: because of the infinite multitude of simple substances it is as if there were as many different universes; but they are all perspectives on the same one, according to the different point of view of each monad."
 CRUMEY


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Benjamin Arcades    Y PHOTOGRAPHY / 689

It was the pantograph, whose principle is equally at work in the physiognotrace, that undertook to transcribe automatically a linear scheme originally traced on paper to a plaster mass, as required by the process of photosculpture­. Serving as model in this process were 24 simultaneous views taken from different sides. Gautier forsees no threat to sculpture from this process. What can prevent the sculptor from artistically enlivening the mechanically produced figure and its ground? “But there is more: for all its extravagance, the century remains economical. Pure art seems to it something expensive. With the cheekiness of a parvenu, it sometimes dares to haggle over masterworks. It is terrifeied of marble and bronze.. But photosculpture is not so daunting as statuary… Photosculpture is used to modest proportions and is content with a set of shelves for pedestal, happy to have faithfully reproduced a beloved countenance.. It does not disdain an overcoat, and is not embarrasses by crinolines; it accepts nature and the world as they are. Its sincerity accommodates everything, and though its plaster casts of stearin can be transposed into marble, into terracotta, into alabaster, or bronze… it never asks, in return for its work, what its elder sister would demand in payment; it requsests only the cost of materials.’ Theophile Gautier / Photosculpture: 42 Boulevard de L’Etoile 


The Seven Old Men

To Victor Hugo

Teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where specters in broad day accost the passer-by!
Everywhere mysteries flow like the sap in a tree
Through the narrow canals of the mighty giant.

One morning, while in a gloomy street the houses,
Whose height was increased by the mist, simulated
The quais of a swollen river, and while
— A setting that was like the actor's soul —

A dirty yellow fog inundated all space,
I was following, steeling my nerves like a hero,
Arid arguing with my already weary soul,
A squalid street shaken by the heavy dump-carts.

Suddenly an old man whose tattered yellow clothes
Were of the same color as the rainy heavens,
And whose aspect would have brought him showers of alms
If his eyes had not gleamed with so much wickedness,

Appeared to me. One would have said his eyes were drenched
With gall; his look sharpened the winter's chill,
And his long shaggy beard, like that of Judas,
Projected from his chin as stiffly as a sword.

He was not bent over, but broken; his back-bone
Made with his legs a perfect right angle,
So that his stick, completing the picture,
Gave him the appearance and clumsy gait

Of a lame quadruped or a three-legged Jew.
He went hobbling along in the snow and the mud
As if he were crushing the dead under his shoes;
Hostile, rather than indifferent to the world,

His likeness followed him: beard, eye, back, stick, tatters,
No mark distinguished this centenarian twin,
Who came from the same hell, and these baroque specters
Were walking with the same gait toward an unknown goal.

Of what infamous plot was I then the object,
Or what evil chance humiliated me thus?
For I counted seven times in as many minutes
That sinister old man who multiplied himself!

Let him who laughs at my disquietude,
And who is not seized with a fraternal shudder,
Realize that in spite of such decrepitude
Those hideous monsters had an eternal look!

Could I, without dying, have regarded the eighth,
Unrelenting Sosia, ironic and fatal,
Disgusting Phoenix, son and father of himself?
— But I turned my back on that hellish procession.

Exasperated like a drunk who sees double,
I went home; I locked the door, terrified,
Chilled to the bone and ill, my mind fevered, confused,
Hurt by that mysterious and absurd happening!

Vainly my reason tried to take the helm;
The frolicsome tempest baffled all its efforts,
And my soul, old sailing barge without masts,
Kept dancing, dancing, on a monstrous, shoreless sea!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)