This dissertation explores the complex entanglements of an artistic traffic between two distinct 'visual economies' in eastern India, c.1772-c.1795. Both late Mughal and early colonial cultures were undergoing transformation, to the extent that during this era the nascent colonial artistic diaspora collapsed. Three inter-related areas will be interrogated: the prestation and commercial circulation of imagery between London, Calcutta and Murshidabad, the dichotomies of political and aesthetic spheres, and colonial representations of late Mughal culture as embroiled by such frameworks. Chapter one examines India-painted subjects in a metropolitan aesthetic sphere, thus acting as crucial juxtaposition for the refiguration of British art in Calcutta, which is the subject of the following section. Hastings' regime wielded British art as part of an intensely spectacular colonial governmentality, but his successor Cornwallis, took a tougher line with devastating effect. A diversity of competing, derivative idioms ousted professional colonial painting forever; its artistic schema penetrated to 'grass-roots' level through the creation of a 'Company School' which transposed the practice of the patua caste. Chapters five to seven investigate nawabi perceptions of British imagery. Hastings introduced the gifting of large-scale portraits; artefacts ill-suited to Indian interiors and aesthetic interiority - perhaps not even viewed as 'art'. The final chapter, through representations of the nawabs of Murshidabad and Lucknow, traces the evolution of British pictures as accoutrements of Mughal sovereignty. By 1795 both courts possessed permanent if 'hybrid' expositions of colonial imagery which transgressed established Indian and British classifications, as well as indicating more profound redefinitions of Indian comportment, consumption and taste. The intersection of 'visual economies' by way of an exploration of diverse zones of transculturation and processes of translation, provides a vital lens for recovering Indian and British agency - both elite and subaltern, in the oft-uneasy formation of a colonial aesthetic forum.

This thesis deals with the two partially interlocking aspects of female patronage and female spirituality in Italian art during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. My aim has been to expand the knowledge of this subject not through a detailed examination of one female patron, her spirituality, and how it affected her commissions, but through a number of representative examples in order to show the breadth and diversity of women's influence over art, both active and passive. I have therefore surveyed previous assumptions on female patronage and the opportunities that existed for it, taking a number of smaller examples so as to lay a base for my later arguments. One of the main problems that emerged was a misunderstanding of the clothes depicted as being worn both by the subjects of the paintings and by the donors, and also the subjective use of clothes in order to put across a message. This aspect also bears on the variety of women's religious experience which underlies the whole of this investigation. It forms a base for my chapters on commissions by and for the Poor Clares and the female Vallombrosan order. Finally, I have looked at two examples of lay female patronage only one of which takes a woman as its subject, and examined the reasons for the choice of subject in relation to the spiritual influences of the commissioner and also the ways in which the direct influence of the patron can be assessed. My research has indicated that both lay women and nuns were not only capable of paying for ambitious projects but that they could also positively affect their iconography. Women's influence over art during this period, and the impact of their spirituality on it, both actively and passively, has only previously been investigated in a few instances. The aim of this thesis is to provide an overview of the female patronage and female spirituality in art and to show that women's influence over art was present in many spheres of society and was not an exception to the rule.

In this study, fluorescein angiograms of the ocular fundus have been digitised to enable them to be processed and analysed by computer. A fully automated technique for counting microaneurysms (MA) in these images was developed with a view to producing an objective, accurate and highly repeatable way of quantifying these lesions. Prior to any other image processing, a number of pre-processing stages were applied in order to compensate for non-uniformaties and to remove the background fluorescence component present in all the images. Matched filters modelled on two-dimensional Gaussian distributions were employed to detect MA in the 'shade-corrected' images. A binary image representation of the vascular network was constructed. This 'vessel mask', used in conjunction with the original match-filtered images, enabled MA to be detected by grey-level thresholding the filtered images. The resulting binary objects could then be counted by the computer as MA. The automated technique was assessed by comparing the computer's results for six fluorescein angiograms with MA counts obtained by ophthalmologists analysing both analogue and digital images. The performance of both man and machine were judged with respect to 'gold standards' compiled from prints of the original negatives. The best results were obtained by the clinicians analysing the analogue prints, although they differed greatly in their ability to detect microaneurysms. The computer performed better than the clinicians when they were counting MA in the digital images and produced highly repeatable results. To improve the performance of the automated technique, images were captured at approximately four times the previous spatial resolution and a smaller area of each image was analysed. Additionally, more complex image-processing techniques were employed to increase the accuracy of the computer analysis. Although the performance of the automated technique was improved, the computer results only matched those of the clinicians' analogue analyses for two of the images.

This thesis addresses the nature of the image and its relationship to human perception and memory. Traditionally psychology approaches the relationship between the image and the human in a representationalist register, in which the world represents itself through images to the subjective observer. The thesis questions these assumptions about the representational relationship between the world, the mind and the image through a study of people using digital photographic technologies. It argues that digital images exist as a complex network of technology and activity that manage their incessant movement, production, consumption, convertibility, connectedness and fragility. The digital image exposes the complex nature of the image as more than a simple representation. If this is the case, then human involvement with images as networks occurs in terms of our inclusion in the network rather than as a subjective observer positioned outside of the world. Henri Bergson proposes that we see the image in terms of a distinction between time and space rather than as an intermediary between a subject and the object. The implications of this for the way in which we think about the interaction between people and technology and the nature of perception and memory are explored through some data examples from three settings. These are; amateur photographers using digital technology; families looking through their stocks of digital images and remembering past events together and finally, displays of family member's histories and identities on the internet.

Post-production facilities deal with large amounts of digital video, which presents difficulties when tracking, managing and searching this material. Recent research work in image and video analysis promises to offer help in these tasks, but there is a gap between what these systems can provide and what users actually need. In particular the popular research models for indexing and retrieving visual data do not fit well with how users actually work. In this thesis we explore how image and video analysis can be applied to an online video collection to assist users in reviewing and searching for material faster, rather than purporting to do it for them. We introduce a framework for automatically generating static 2-dimen- sional storyboards from video sequences. The storyboard consists of a series of frames, one for each shot in the sequence, showing the principal objects and motions of the shot. The storyboards are rendered as vector images in a familiar comic book style, allowing them to be quickly viewed and understood. The process consists of three distinct steps: shot-change detection, object segmentation, and presentation. The nature of the video material encountered in a post-production fa- cility is quite different from other material such as television programmes. Video sequences such as commercials and music videos are highly dy- namic with very short shots, rapid transitions and ambiguous edits. Video is often heavily manipulated, causing difficulties for many video processing techniques. We study the performance of a variety of published shot-change de- tection algorithms on the type of highly dynamic video typically encoun- tered in post-production work. Finding their performance disappointing, we develop a novel algorithm for detecting cuts and fades that operates directly on Motion-JPEG compressed video, exploiting the DCT coeffi- cients to save computation. The algorithm shows superior performance on highly dynamic material while performing comparably to previous algorithms on other material.

Communist Stardom in the Cold War: Josip Broz Tito in Western and Yugoslav Photography, 1943-1980 Nikolina Kurtovic Doctor of Philosophy Department of Art University of Toronto 2010 Abstract This dissertation examines the iconographic and ideological aspects of the public image of Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Socialist Yugoslavia and one of the major historical personalities of the twentieth century. By studying the specific historical, political, and cultural contexts of Tito’s changing iconography between 1943 and 1980, I considers a dynamic relationship between the Western and Eastern perspectives on his leadership style, personality, and role, as communicated in the idiom of Western photojournalism and celebrity photography, as well as the style of official presidential photography in Yugoslavia. I analyze photo-essays on Tito published in Life, Time, and Picture Post, and in the official Yugoslav magazines, Yugoslavia and Yugoslav Review, as well as his portraits by Yousuf Karsh and by Ivo Eterovic in his photo-book Tito’s Private Life. I engage the issues of image reception by studying fundamental stereotypes within the canon of Tito photography, exploring their relation to the popular and political discourses on war heroism, resistance myth, masculinity, leadership, communism, disease, romance, family, leisure and celebrity in the U.S. during World War Two and the Cold War. Tito’s photographs are compared with relevant examples in modern portrait photography, photojournalism, and European painting, thereby situating Tito’s example in the tradition of Western political image making, but also in relation to local traditions. My dissertation shows that the practical role of the cult of Tito in the American press during the Cold War was to render him and Yugoslavia as examples for the satellite countries, and to enlist popular support for U.S. policy. It also helped Tito navigate a political crisis following his 1948 break with Stalin. The iconography created in this context contributed to the genesis and modernizing of Yugoslav presidential photography in the 1950s. Appropriating the rhetoric and formal devices of Western celebrity and glamour photography, Yugoslav photographs created a set of presidential stereotypes and their photographs were bearers of the conventional narrative of Tito’s presidency in Yugoslav magazines and books addressing Western audiences between 1960 and 1980. My dissertation underscores the role of cross-cultural contacts and contexts for developing, maintaining, and understanding of Tito’s publicity and celebrity in the West.

Physis presents eight digitally constructed photographic images and one video installation that were created through mixing and sampling a variety of representations of built environments, visual languages and processes. What results from this image compositing are ambiguous, dreamlike, in-between spaces that mine the relationship between nature and contemporary culture. Through the creation of poetic, ambiguous images viewers are able to form their own response to the individual images and the exhibition as whole. My approach of creating an experience that is more poetic than didactic was born out of a response to contemporary and historical photographs and writings, and to the directness found in images belonging to contemporary media culture. While Physis does allow for multiple interpretations, for me, this body of work references ideas of interconnectedness, transmission and the redefinition of space through connections between studio processes, the body, the digital and the visual.

Architecture is an act of agency, and a technology that can be learned by anyone for their own purpose. It evolved as a system of organization and a protective shell for our fragile bodies, a vast, complex technology that enables human survival. Yet despite its universal nature, we have artificially limited our control over it, and who has access to it; we limit its potentials, its adaptive capacities, its diversity, and our continued survival. Walled-up in universities, behind certifications and dissertations, we have removed architecture from the public’s mind so that few understand it and use it. The city, in its surging complexity, is ever more opaque; the systems, infrastructure, and regulations that govern its formation are hidden from view, behind doors, walls, and fences. Hack seeks to make the city legible and architecture accessible, by leveraging a growing tide of hacker culture, and its subcultures – makers and DIY drone enthusiasts – and their respective technologies. Since the birth of the computer, Hackers have sought to democratize information technology held by military, government, and corporate interests. In doing so they’ve provided a number of methods, that enable free sharing and collaboration between individuals, distributing problem-solving practices, open-source systems, hands-on education, and free access to tools, all applicable to the challenges and opportunities facing architecture and city building today. Hack bootstraps itself to these ideals with hands-on experiments and reflections on those experiments, reframing architecture as a basic skill, a technology to be used by anyone, democratizing architecture through online communities, and the Hacker culture, in order to define a new active role for the architect. Internalizing the Hacker Ethic, and appropriate existing technologies to build new tools – devices to survey space, architecture and the city. – Hack traces the construction of a kite, a model car, a quadrocopter, and a remote-control airplane, each capable of gathering intimate information about the local environment. Hack concludes by reexamining the role of the aerial view in making cities and exercising power, speculating on the potential to level the fields of perception through online co-operation and these small-scale cartographic technologies.

This study examines some of the fundamental principles of a number of influential photographers working in Germany in the 1920s and assesses the ways they understood the world through their camera's lens. German photography initiated a complex engagement with the modern world and marked a significant reevaluation of the relationship between the camera, perception and reality. The unique quality of the photographic image's verisimilitude of nature was an important phenomenon in this re-evaluation, as it led to assumptions about the capacity of photography to reveal the truth of reality. László Moholy-Nagy's innovative employment of a variety of photographic techniques provide an effective conduit to modern theories about photography that not only expose the presumptions surrounding the photographic image, but also the inherent complications. I propose that the avant-garde photographic experiments of 1920s Germany radically changed the ways in which humanity perceived and interacted with the surrounding world.

Aerial photography obtained by UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) is an emerging market for civil applications. Small UAVs are believed to close gaps in niche markets, such as acquiring airborne image data for remote sensing purposes. Small UAVs will be able to fly at low altitudes, in dangerous environments and over long periods of time. However, the small lightweight constructions of these UAVs lead to new problems, such as higher agility leading to more susceptibility to turbulence and limitations in space and payload for sensor systems. This research investigates the use of low-cost fisheye lenses to overcome such problems which theoretically makes the airborne imaging less sensitive to turbulence. The fisheye lens has the benet of a large observation area (large field of view) and doesn't add additional weight to the aircraft, like traditional mechanical stabilizing systems. This research presents the implementation of a fisheye lens for aerial photography and mapping purposes, including theoretical background of fisheye lenses. Based on the unique feature of the distortion being a function of the viewing angle, methods used to derive the fisheye lens distortion are presented. The lens distortion is used to rectify the fisheye images before these images can be used in aerial photography. A detailed investigation into the inner orientation of the camera and inertial sensor is given, as well as the registration of airborne collected images. It was found that the attitude estimation is critical towards accurate mapping using low quality sensors. A loosely coupled EKF filter applied to the GPS and inertial sensor data estimated the attitude to an accuracy of 3-5° (1-sigma) using low-cost sensors typically found in small UAVs. However, the use of image stitching techniques may improve the outcome. On the other hand, lens distortion caused by the fisheye lens can be addressed by rectification techniques and removed to a sub-pixel level. Results of the process present image sequences gathered from a piloted aircraft demonstrating the achieved performance and potential applications towards UAVs. Further, an unforeseen issue with a vibrating part in the lens lead to the need for vibration compensation. The vibration could be estimated to ±1 pixel in 75% of the cases by applying an extended Hough transform to the fisheye images.