5,993 research outputs found
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
An investigation in unsupervised 2D To 3D human pose estimation
No full text3D human pose estimation is a highly evolving area of research within computer vision with numerous real-world applications such as animation, human-robot interaction and security. With 3D pose datasets being expensive, lacking in terms of pose diversity and typically only involving controlled scenes, unsupervised 2D-3D lifting has become a popular branch of 3D human pose estimation that attempts to lift a 2D pose intermediate into 3D without the requirement of 3D data. However, all 2D-3D lifting approaches simply assume that the 2D pose will be available during inference and that 2D detectors are accurate. In fact no research investigates their accuracy or how we can link 2D and 3D human pose estimation into a usable end-to-end approach. This research is designed to bridge this gap and investigate the end-to-end flow of unsupervised 2D-3D pose estimation highlighting and addressing limitations at various points. In this thesis five total contributions are introduced and analysed to accomplish this objective. Our first contribution was our investigation into the drop in performance of 2D pose detectors in low-resolution scenarios. In particular we investigated if super-resolution can be used in order to improve results. However we found that while the detection of people within our images improved, their keypoint detection did not. This leads to our novel thresholded Mask-RCNN approach that achieved the highest performance results in our low-resolution 2D pose datasets. Our second contribution investigated 2D pose representations within the field of unsupervised 2D-3D human pose estimation (HPE). All prior unsupervised 2D-3D HPE approaches provided the entire 2D kinematic skeleton to a model during training. We argued that this is sub-optimal and disruptive as long-range correlations will be induced between independent 2D key points and predicted 3D coordinates during training. With a maximum architecture capacity of 6 residual blocks, we evaluated the performance of 7 lifting models which each represented a 2D pose differently during the unsupervised 2D-3D lifting process. Additionally, we showed the correlations induced between 2D key points when a full pose is lifted, highlighting the unintuitive correlations learned. Our results showed that the most optimal representation of a 2D pose during the lifting stage is that of two independent segments, the torso and legs, with no shared features between each lifting network. This approach decreased the average error by 20% on the Human3.6M dataset when compared to a model with a near identical parameter count trained on the entire 2D kinematic skeleton. Our third contribution was our lifting network LInKs (Lifting Independent Keypoints), a novel unsupervised learning method that was able recover 3D human poses from 2D poses obtained from a single image, even when the certain forms of occlusions were present. Our approach followed a unique two-step process, which involved first lifting the occluded 2D pose to the 3D domain, followed by filling in the occluded parts using the partially reconstructed 3D coordinates. This lift-then-fill approach lead to significantly more accurate results compared to an identical model that completed the pose in 2D space prior to being lifted into 3D. Additionally, we improved the stability and likelihood estimation of normalising flows through a custom sampling function replacing PCA dimensionality reduction used in prior work. Our fourth contribution is one of the first 3D multi-person human pose estimation systems that is able to work in real-time and is also able to handle basic forms of occlusion. First, we combined our previous lifting network LInKs with an off-the-shelf 2D detector, which would be used with a 360 panoramic camera and three mmWave radar sensors. We then introduced our improved matching of people within the image and radar space. This system addressed both the depth and scale ambiguity problems by employing a lightweight 2D-3D pose lifting algorithm that is able to work in real-time while exhibiting accurate performance in both indoor and outdoor environments which offers both an affordable and scalable solution. Notably, the time complexity remains nearly constant irrespective of the number of detected individuals, achieving a frame rate of approximately 7-8 fps on a laptop with a commercial-grade GPU. Our final contribution tackled the fact that unsupervised 2D-3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods do not work in multi-person scenarios due to perspective ambiguity in monocular images. Therefore, we presented one of the first studies investigating the feasibility of unsupervised multi-person 2D-3D HPE from just 2D poses alone, focusing on reconstructing human interactions. To address the issue of perspective ambiguity, we expand upon prior work by predicting the cameras' elevation angle relative to the subjects' pelvis. This allowed us to rotate the predicted poses to be level with the ground plane, while obtaining an estimate for the vertical offset in 3D between individuals. Our method involved independently lifting each subject's 2D pose to 3D, before combining them in a shared 3D coordinate system. The poses are then rotated and offset by the predicted elevation angle before being scaled. This by itself enables us to retrieve an accurate 3D reconstruction of their poses. We present our results on the CHI3D dataset, introducing its use within unsupervised 2D-3D pose estimation with three new quantitative metrics, and establishing a benchmark for future research
The Two Timothy Coopers
Get PDFOnce or twice when I read and re-read the scene of the railway survey in Middlemarch I felt a sense of niggling lost connection, then one day I belatedly found it. George Eliot had copied the name of Elizabeth Gaskell\u27s Timothy Cooper, in Cousin Phillis, for her character in Middlemarch.
Eliot wrote to Gaskell1 that she felt an affinity with \u27the feeling which inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton\u27 and had read Cranford when writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Mary Barton when writing Adam Bede. When The Moorland Cottage was proposed as source for The Mill on the Floss she said she had not read it. She writes about Ruth, The Life of Charlotte Bronte and Sylvia\u27s Lovers, but as far as I know never mentions Cousin Phillis, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine between November and February, 1863-4, six years before Eliot began to brood over Middlemarch, nine before her novel began its serial appearance. She is unlikely not to have read Gaskell\u27s novella, and also unlikely, I think, to have deliberately used the name of its Timothy Cooper. It seems to be a case of creative forgetting.
The two Timothy Coopers are poor farm labourers, on the fringe of the action, each given one big scene. They might be called minor characters but the description is misleading. I once wrote that George Eliot refused to create minor characters, liking to imply that every figure in her fiction has, as she explicitly says, a \u27centre of self\u27. The same is true of Gaskell, exemplified in her late novella Cousin Phillis, a feat of condensation she described as \u27a complete fragment\u27 , an oxymoron effortlessly defining the story and its genre.
Timothy Cooper is only one link between the greatest Victorian novella, narrative at its most terse and small-scale, and the greatest Victorian long novel, narrative at its most expansive. Both works combine love-story - twanging what the narrator of Middlemarch calls the old troubadour strings - with wide geographical reference (the Midlands, Italy and America) and historical range. Both dramatize and discuss the coming of railways to England. Cousin Phillis dramatizes more detail about technicalities (shunting, difficulties of laying rail on marshy ground) and personnel (share-holders, managing engineer, clerk, inventors, and navvies) than Middlemarch, and inserts English railways between those in Piedmont and Canada. We may list Gaskell with Robert Evans and Herbert Spencer, both involved with railway survey and works, as a source of Eliot\u27s railway information
Money piece by Timothy P. Agnew, chief executive officer of the Finance Author
No full textMoney piece by Timothy P. Agnew, chief executive officer of the Finance Authority of Maine, about the increased availability of credit for Maine\u27s small businesses
Omnidirectional depth estimation for semantic segmentation
No full textThis research presents a comprehensive system encompassing semantic segmentation and depth estimation for 360-degree images. It introduces effective methodologies to tackle the challenges associated with depth estimation in panoramic imagery and enhance the precision of semantic segmentation. This article is primarily divided into two sections. The first section emphasizes the significance of integrating depth information in semantic segmentation tasks by comparing its impact to cases where it is not utilized. The second part delves into the discussion of three different approaches to address the spherical distortion in 360-degree images and constructs neural networks for depth estimation. A variety of evaluation metrics are employed to analyze, assess, and compare the results of these three methods while exploring their respective advantages and drawbacks
Can super resolution improve human pose estimation in low resolution scenarios?
No full textThe results obtained from state of the art human pose estimation (HPE) models degrade rapidly when evaluating people of a low resolution, but can super resolution (SR) be used to help mitigate this effect? By using various SR approaches we enhanced two low resolution datasets and evaluated the change in performance of both an object and keypoint detector as well as end-to-end HPE results. We remark the following observations. First we find that for people who were originally depicted at a low resolution (segmentation area in pixels), their keypoint detection performance would improve once SR was applied. Second, the keypoint detection performance gained is dependent on that persons pixel count in the original image prior to any application of SR; keypoint detection performance was improved when SR was applied to people with a small initial segmentation area, but degrades as this becomes larger. To address this we introduced a novel Mask-RCNN approach, utilising a segmentation area threshold to decide when to use SR during the keypoint detection step. This approach achieved the best results on our low resolution datasets for each HPE performance metrics
Biblical Theology Exegesis of 1 Timothy 4:1-5
Get PDFThis research paper takes a close look at Paul\u27s theology from a short excerpt of his letter to Timothy. It is applicable to the lives of believers still today. Paul\u27s letter touches on topics such as prophecy, apostasy, eschatology, and creation theology which are overarching themes throughout all of Scripture and this paper attempts to make those connections
Timothy Meyer serves as a contributing author for UN report
No full textAssistant Professor Timothy Meyer served as a contributing author for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization\u27s report titled Networks for Prosperity: Connecting Development Knowledge Beyond 2015. The document, which was released during November, analyzes the nexus between the global connectedness of a country and its economic success, sustainability and government effectiveness. Meyer was one of only approximately 20 academic and practical experts from around the world selected to serve as a contributor after a global call for proposals.
Learn more View the full repor
The (weakly) sign symmetric P-matrix completion problems
Get PDFIn this paper it is shown that a partial sign symmetric P-matrix, whose digraph of specified entries is a symmetric n-cycle with n ≥ 6, can be completed to a sign symmetric P-matrix. The analogous completion property is also established for a partial weakly sign symmetric P-matrix and for a partial weakly sign symmetric P0-matrix. Patterns of entries for 4 × 4 matrices are classified as to whether or not a partial (weakly) sign symmetric P- or weakly sign symmetric P0-matrix specifying the pattern must have completion to the same type of matrix. The relationship between the weakly sign symmetric P- and sign symmetric P-matrix completion problems is also examined.This article is published as DeAlba, Luz Maria, Timothy L. Hardy, Leslie Hogben, and Amy Wangsness. "The (weakly) sign symmetric P-matrix completion problems." The Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra 10 (2003): 257-271. DOI: 10.13001/1081-3810.1112. Posted with permission.</p
Selected Contributions of Sister Mary Berenice Beck, O.S.F. to Nursing in the United States, 1923-1956
No full textby Sister M. Timothy Costello.Typescript.Thesis (M.S.N.)--Catholic University of America.Bibliography: leaves 44-47.Also available in microfilm
- …
