Silhouettes

The opulent colours and ornamentation, exotic characters and landscapes, as well as astonishing journeys and magic may resemble other European adaptations of Arabian Nights fairy tales. Yet remarkable technical and political innovations distinguish Lotte Reiniger's 1926 'Scherenschnitte' shadow animation film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. Engaging with various readings of Reiniger's evolving technical and narrative approaches, this article complicates unproblematized celebrations of the film's innovations as well as critiques of the film as Orientalist, arguing that both facets are in complex ways interdependent. The technical feats and orientalist tropes at once veil the progressive messaging and permit the audience to imagine a different world.

To Nurith, my mother, who with infinite love taught me how to look at paintings 1. To draw a line by candlelight I n his memoirs, the painter Giorgio de Chirico returns to his childhood with particular attention to the times and events surrounding the death of his father. In his description of that period clouded by death, there are two particular episodes that invite us to draw a connection between de Chirico's experience of loss and mourning and the developing sense of his vocation as an artist. The first episode had taken place a few weeks before the death of Giorgio's father.

From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, Jürgen Heinrichs and Maria I. Dietrich, eds. Münster, Hamburg, Berlin, Wien, London: LIT Verlag (German) and University of Michigan Press (English), 2010; 287-307.

It is remarkable that art history has paid little attention to the silhouette as an art form. Silhouettes have been cherished only as family likenesses or 'tolerated' as decorative items, all-purpose as illustrations without content, spared from comprehensive scientific art historical analysis, in short: as a pleasant but secondary product of arts and crafts. In fact, the silhouette and its corollary, the contour, are not only two essential forms of papercutting, moreover they held a key role in late-eighteenth-century art. The meaning in the European history of art becomes evident when thinking of John Flaxman's contour drawings of Homer (1793), Aischylos (1795) and Dante (1802) and of the famous Wedgwood ceramics with their white figures on blue ground. These art forms conquered the hearts of European art lovers by storm. The rediscovery of Greek vase paintings during Classicism and art theoretical attempts to detect the origin of painting to the tracing of the human shadow have their reference point in the practical aesthetic of the silhouette technique. In doing silhouettes the upper middle class found a favourite occupation. In 18 th century salons the bourgeoisie was entertained with house music, reading circles and by doing silhouettes. Therefore, it is no surprise, that during that time mechanical tools were developed to make the creation of silhouettes easier for professionals and amateurs, alike. The silhouette was highly fashionable of the time. The German silhouettist Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829) did not only find a nice leisure activity in taking profiles. Scissors and paper became her "artistic tools". The inventiveness and artistic ability in her cut outs led her to become the most important silhouettist in Germany even during her lifetime. Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul and other leading German intellectuals were part of her circle of friends. Her unique oeuvre, regarding quantity as well as quality, is kept mainly at the famous Schiller National Museum/German Literature Archive (Schiller Nationalmuseum/Deutsches Literaturarchiv) Marbach am Neckar, Germany. These cut outs -about 1.500 -are concerned with a multifacetted range of topics and offer a remarkable source for research into the cultural history in Germany around 1800. The dissertation introduces the forgotten and hither to unknown silhouettes to the general public for the first time ever. The fragile paper objects are of inestimable historical value an outstanding treasure of the museum and moreover art works of national importance.

The combination of body and facial animation achieves significant results. While the main actions focuses on body movement and silhouette, the facial animation explores intention and emotion, though there are also emotions related to specific body gestures. If this combination is correctly explored, face and body gestures allows the viewer to exactly understand what’s happening and why. The human being is exceptionally good at reading body language of other people (or characters) and even better reading facial expressions. The main reason is that, since its birth, the human being observes others’ faces and bodies to understand what is happening around them and trying to determine someone’s thought. In this context, animators have been studying different techniques and styles to create much more expressive movements and emotion acting. This article delves into analyzes of facial and body animation, correlating emotion, human and character behavior.

This paper examines the role of physiognomy in early film through the theoretical writings of Béla Balázs and the animated films of Lotte Reiniger. Departing from Johann Caspar Lavater’s conception of physiognomy as a science of stasis, I argue that Balázs reconceived the field—via Goethe—as an art of motion. Lotte Reiniger played a key and rarely examined role in Balázs’s film theory. By mobilizing the physiognomic line through the cut of the scissors, Reiniger developed a body of work that recast the silhouette as a dynamic entity whose expressive choreography reveals the influence of dance on early animation.

Human gait, which is a new biometric aimed to recognize individuals by the way they walk have come to play an increasingly important role in visual surveillance applications. In this paper a novel hybrid holistic approach is proposed to show how behavioural walking characteristics can be used to recognize unauthorized and suspicious persons when they enter a surveillance area. Initially background is modelled from the input video captured from cameras deployed for security and the foreground moving object in the individual frames are segmented using the background subtraction algorithm. Then gait representing spatial, temporal and wavelet components are extracted and fused for training and testing multi class support vector machine models (SVM). The proposed system is evaluated using side view videos of NLPR database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves a pleasing recognition rate and also the results indicate that the classification ability of SVM with Radial Basis Function (RBF) is better than with other kernel functions.

Clustering is the technique to partition data according to their characteristics. Data that are similar in nature belong to the same cluster [1]. There are two types of evaluation methods to evaluate clustering quality. One is an external evaluation where the truth labels in the data sets are known in advance and the other is internal evaluation in which the evaluation is done with data set itself without true labels. In this paper, both external evaluation and internal evaluation are performed on the cluster results of the IRIS dataset. In the case of external evaluation Homogeneity, Correctness and V-measure scores are calculated for the dataset. For internal performance measures, the Silhouette Index and Sum of Square Errors are used. These internal performance measures along with the dendrogram (graphical tool from hierarchical Clustering) are used first to validate the number of clusters. Finally, as a statistical tool, we used the frequency distribution method to compare and provide a visual representation of the distribution of observations within a clustering result and the original data.

Random Sampling Silhouettes Reconstructions Figure 1: Left: Our method generates multi-view depth maps and silhouettes, and uses a rendering function to obtain the 3D shapes. Right: We can also extend our framework to reconstruct 3D shapes from single/multi-view depth maps or silhouettes. Abstract We study the problem of learning generative models of 3D shapes. Voxels or 3D parts have been widely used as the underlying representations to build complex 3D shapes; however, voxel-based representations suffer from high memory requirements, and parts-based models require a large collection of cached or richly parametrized parts. We take an alternative approach: learning a generative model over multi-view depth maps or their corresponding silhouettes, and using a deterministic rendering function to produce 3D shapes from these images. A multi-view representation of shapes enables generation of 3D models with fine details , as 2D depth maps and silhouettes can be modeled at a much higher resolution than 3D voxels. Moreover, our approach naturally brings the ability to recover the underlying 3D representation from depth maps of one or a few viewpoints. Experiments show that our framework can generate 3D shapes with variations and details. We also demonstrate that our model has out-of-sample generalization power for real-world tasks with occluded objects.

Code and data here: https://github.com/Amir-Arsalan/Synthesize3DviaDepthOrSil

Human gait recognition is moving ahead by the need for automated person identification and verification at a distance in many applications. In this paper our system presented silhouette videos and neural networks based system for human identification. For each sequence of silhouette images, an automated Region of Interest (ROI) algorithm applied to reduce dimensionality, extract gait features has been attempted with 3level 2Dimension Discrete Wavelet Transform (3L-2D-DWT), edges detection and gait cycle were used to extract relevant feature. Back propagations neural networks used as pattern recognition. The MATLAB software graphics user interface is designed to display result and simplify the use of the system. The developed system has been evaluated using (TUM-IITKGP) which contains three different type of walking categories and the results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves 98.8%, 95.87% and 88% for normal walk, walking with backpack and walking with hand in pocket category respectively of correct recognition. We concluded that the different side of view movement increase reliability of the key extracted feature and improve the neural network performance which opens a scope for further development.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) in the North Atlantic (NA) basin pose an annual risk to coastal regions, with hurricane
Katrina (2005) the costliest TC in US history. This study employs K-means cluster analysis (CA) to detect the
distinctive, important NA TC paths and lifecycles. Unlike previous TC cluster analyses, which examined TC tracks,
the present work documents TC genesis and decay locations. Application of the silhouette coefficient provided an
objective method to determine the optimal number of clusters (7 for genesis locations, 6 for preferred tracks, and 5
for decay locations). Additionally, silhouette coefficients provided the information necessary to remove storms that
did not fit specific clusters, improving cluster cohesiveness.
For TC genesis, K-means CA captured the separation between tropical and higher-latitude TCs. Clustering of
genesis points identifies formative areas. The western NA cluster is the most active. TCs have distinct decay
locations, notably in the western NA, Gulf of Mexico and western Caribbean Sea. Clustering TC tracks reveals that
TCs moving to higher latitudes recurve generally, whereas Caribbean and Gulf coast TCs have straight-line tracks.
Temporally, early season TC clusters form in the western Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and western NA. Midseason
TC clusters shift eastward, extending from the tropical NA to Africa. Late season TC clusters recur in the
Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico and western NA.

It is often assumed that when we see common objects in standard light this is in virtue of seeing their facing surfaces. Here I argue that we should reject that claim. Either we don’t see objects’ facing surfaces, or – if we hold on to the claim that we do see such things – it is at least not in virtue of seeing them that we see common-or-garden objects. I end by showing how this conclusion squares both with our intuitions and with the facts of vision science.

»Weder in der Nacht, noch bey Tage transpirirte Kant«; 1 so verrät der Königsberger Diakon Ehregott Wasianski -Sekretär und Testamentsvollstrecker des Philosophen -in seinen Aufzeichnungen über dessen letzte Lebensjahre. Dieser Hinweis besitzt vor allem eine Funktion: er unterstreicht die intime Kenntnis des Biografen von seinem Gegenstand und dient der Beglaubigung. Bereits in der Vorrede seiner Schrift betont Wasianski, dass der »Charakter eines Menschen [...] nur durch sorgfältiges, unpartheyisches, am sichersten aber durch tägliches Beobachten seiner verschiedenen Launen und kleinsten Gewohnheiten entziffert werden [kann]«. 2 Und getreu dieser Richtlinie empirischer Objektivität berichtet er daraufhin von Kants schlechter Verdauung oder mangelnder Reinlichkeit. Wasianski selbst nennt das eine Darstellung des großen Mannes »ohne alle Schminke und entkleidet von allem Prunk, gleichsam nur in seinem Negligee« 3 -Giorgio Manganelli hingegen sieht hier die Augenzeugenschaft von verblüffender Indiskretion und Hinterhältigkeit getönt. 4 Jene »Infamie« Wasianskis, der man ebenso in den Kant-Biografien seiner Königsberger Zeitgenossen Reinhold Jachmann und Ludwig Ernst Borowski begegnet, offenbart zugleich das grundsätzliche Dilemma, dem sich Texte mit derlei faktischem Anspruch ausgesetzt sehen: Die direkte Teilhabe aller drei Autoren am Leben Kants soll einerseits das in