The Memory Box

A Memory Box was built to illustrate the possibility of recording and attaching stories to memorabilia kept in a box. Potential users then provided a range of ideas about what kinds of stories and objects they would keep in the box, and how they would use it. The findings confirm the value of attaching stories to souvenirs, especially in the context of gift-giving, and have implications for how this might be implemented through augmented reality interfaces.     

Relationships between visual landscape preferences and map-based indicators of landscape structure

There is increasing awareness of the need to monitor trends in our constantly changing agricultural landscapes. Monitoring programmes often use remote sensing data and focus on changes in land cover/land use in relation to values such as biodiversity, cultural heritage and recreation. Although a wide range of indicators is in use, landscape aesthetics is a topic that is frequently neglected. Our aim was to determine whether aspects of landscape content and configuration could be used as surrogate measures for visual landscape quality in monitoring programmes based on remote sensing. In this paper, we test whether map-derived indicators of landscape structure from the Norwegian monitoring programme for agricultural landscapes are correlated with visual landscape preferences. Two groups of people participated: (1) locals and (2) non-local students. Using the total dataset, we found significant positive correlations between preferences and spatial metrics, including number of land types, number of patches and land type diversity. In addition, preference scores were high where water was present within the mapped image area, even if the water itself was not visible in the images. When the dataset was split into two groups, we found no significant correlation between the preference scores of the students and locals. Whilst the student group preferred images portraying diverse and heterogeneous landscapes, neither diversity nor heterogeneity was correlated with the preference scores of the locals. We conclude that certain indicators based on spatial structure also have relevance in relation to landscape preferences in agricultural landscapes. However, the finding that different groups of people prefer different types of landscape underlines the need for care when interpreting indicator values.     

A statistical approach to the problem of restoring damaged and contaminated images

We address the problem of automatically identifying and restoring damaged and contaminated images. We suggest a novel approach based on a semi-parametric model. This has two components, a parametric component describing known physical characteristics and a more flexible non-parametric component. The latter avoids the need for a detailed model for the sensor, which is often costly to produce and lacking in robustness. We assess our approach using an analysis of electroencephalographic images contaminated by eye-blink artefacts and highly damaged photographs contaminated by non-uniform lighting. These experiments show that our approach provides an effective solution to problems of this type.     

Augmenting photographs with audio

We report a user requirements study of several interfaces for the playback of sounds from photographs. The study showed that users liked listening to audiophotos when the sounds are played back from photographic prints, but as a complement to playback on a PC. When handling prints the audio needs to be invoked manually from the print with a facility to pause the audio during playback. A handheld audioprint player was then designed to fulfill these needs, based on an embedded chip in the paper.     

PhotoCap处理照片的应用

通过对Photocap的使用,发现其功能丰富、操作简单,可以处理或修复照片,制作海报、大头贴、编辑大头照、美化照片、个人秀等,非常的实用。     

Attributing semantics to personal photographs

A major bottleneck for the efficient management of personal photographic collections is the large gap between low-level image features and high-level semantic contents of images. This paper proposes and evaluates two methodologies for making appropriate (re)use of natural language photographic annotations for extracting references to people, location and objects and propagating any location references encountered to previously unannotated images. The evaluation identifies the strengths of each approach and shows extraction and propagation results with promising accuracy.

Characteristics of a liquefied butane spray

The characteristics of a butane spray from pintle-type injector were studied by droplet velocity and diameter measurements and high speed photography. The accumulator type injector operated off a common rail fuel supply system operated at 13 MPa, and was controlled by a high-speed solenoid valve. Injection was carried out in a chamber at ambient temperature and at the pressure above (0.37 MPa) and below (0.15 MPa) the fuel vapor pressure. Two component phase/Doppler particle analyzer and traverser were used to obtain the droplet diameter and the velocity at numerous locations in the spray. The entire injection event was analyzed as a time-average and also subdivided into three temporal intervals. A, B, and C. The high-speed photographs showed a narrower cone angle during the quasi-steady spray period at the 0.37 MPa chamber pressure compared to the 0.15 MPa case.     

Indoor vs. outdoor scene classification in digital photographs

This paper proposes a new technique for the classification of indoor and outdoor images based on edge analysis. Our technique is based on analysing edge straightness in images. We make an original proposal that indoor images have a greater proportion of edges that are straight compared to outdoor images, and use multi-resolution estimates on edge straightness to improve our results. We also consider this method's possible applications in a real-time system. We compare our proposed technique with a number of other approaches that have been published on indoor/outdoor classification of images and convincingly show on a large database that our method generates much higher accuracy.