These sketches and stories are the result of moods, daydreams, and experiences. The collection progresses from those intimate stories controlled by personal experience to the last two works which try to crystallize a mood or experience in a medium without the device of first person. "Grandpa," "Great-Grandpa," and "Weedgod" are sketches which describe the boundary between what things are and what things seem to be. "Aunt Mary," "Hospital," and "Eggy Cooter" are short stories presenting situations in which the reader can determine this boundary line himself.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) is one of the most important American impressionists in the twentieth century. This study focuses on the piano solo work Roman Sketches (Op.7) which Griffes composed during 1915-16, and it is the most representative work in his impressionistic styles. This work includes four pieces, which are The White Peacock, Nightfall, The Fountain of the Acqua Paola, and Clouds. Griffes quoted the four poems as forwards from the poetry Sospiri di Roma of the Scottish poet William Sharp (1855-1905) which mainly described the natural scene. Griffes integrated many musical elements of the Impressionism in Roman Sketches, such as whole-tone scales, pentatonic scales and exoticism. The first chapter in this study introduces the life of Griffes and characteristics of his piano works, and also emphasizes about how his works were affected by impressionism. The second chapter contains the historical background and the harmonic and melodic materials in Roman Sketches. Interpretative point of view about literary connection between music content and the poetry of Sharp is also discussed in this chapter.

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Doctor en Ciencias, Mención Computación / Debido al uso masivo de Internet y a la proliferación de dispositivos capaces de generar información multimedia, la búsqueda y recuperación de imágenes basada en contenido se han convertido en áreas de investigación activas en ciencias de la computación. Sin embargo, la aplicación de búsqueda por contenido requiere una imagen de ejemplo como consulta, lo cual muchas veces puede ser un problema serio, que imposibilite la usabilidad de la aplicación. En efecto, los usuarios comúnmente hacen uso de un buscador de imágenes porque no cuentan con la imagen deseada. En este sentido, un modo alternativo de expresar lo que el usuario intenta buscar es mediante un dibujo a mano compuesto, simplemente, de trazos, sketch, lo que onduce a la búsqueda por imágenes basada en sketches. Hacer este tipo de consultas es soportado, además, por el hecho de haberse incrementado la accesibilidad a dispositivos táctiles, facilitando realizar consultas de este tipo. En este trabajo, se proponen dos métodos aplicados a la recuperación de imágenes basada en sketches. El primero es un método global que calcula un histograma de orientaciones usando gradientes cuadrados. Esta propuesta exhibe un comportamiento sobresaliente con respecto a otros métodos globales. En la actualidad, no existen métodos que aprovechen la principal característica de los sketches, la información estructural. Los sketches carecen de color y textura y representan principalmente la estructura de los objetos que se quiere buscar. En este sentido, se propone un segundo método basado en la representación estructural de las imágenes mediante un conjunto de formas primitivas que se denominan keyshapes. Los resultados de nuestra propuesta han sido comparados con resultados de métodos actuales, mostrando un incremento significativo en la efectividad de la recuperación. Además, puesto que nuestra propuesta basada en keyshapes explota una característica novedosa, es posible combinarla con otras técnicas para incrementar la efectividad de los resultados. Así, en este trabajo se ha evaluado la combinación del método propuesto con el método propuesto por Eitz et al., basado en Bag of Words, logrando un aumento de la efectividad de casi 22%. Finalmente, con el objetivo de mostrar el potencial de nuestra propuesta, se muestran dos aplicaciones. La primera está orientada al contexto de recuperación de modelos 3D usando un dibujo a mano como consulta. En esta caso, nuestros resultados muestran competitividad con el estado del arte. La segunda aplicación explota la idea de buscar objetos basada en la estructura para mejorar el proceso de segmentación. En particular, mostramos una aplicación de segmentación de manos en ambientes semi-controlados.

The quality of an input sketch can affect performance of the computational algorithms. However, the quality of a sketch is not often considered when working with sketch tasks and automated sketch quality prediction has not been previously studied. This thesis presents quality prediction on the "Sketchy" dataset. The method presented here predicts a quality label rather than a zero to one quality metric. This thesis predicts an understandable label rather than a computer-generated quality metric with no human input. Previous tasks like sketch classification have used a transformer architecture to leverage the vector format of sketches. The architecture used in sketch classification was called Sketchformer. The Sketchformer was adopted and trained to predict quality labels of hand-drawn sketches. This Sketchformer architecture achieves 66% accuracy when predicting the 5-labels. The same transformer achieves up to 97% accuracy in a different experiment when combining the different labels into good versus bad (2-label) experiments. The sketchformer significantly outperforms the SVM baseline. The results of the experiments show that the transformer embedding space facilitates separation of 'good' sketch quality from 'bad' sketch quality with high accuracy. / Master of Science / If pictures are worth 1000 words, then sketches are worth a few hundred words. Sketches are easy to create using a pen and tablet. Objects in the sketches can be drawn many ways, depending on the talent of the creator and pose of the object. The quality of the sketches vary pretty drastically. When using sketches in computer vision tasks, the quality of a sketch can affect the performance of the computational algorithm. However, the quality of a sketch is not often considered when working with other sketch tasks. One common sketch task is called Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR). The input of this task is the sketch of an object/subject, and the model returns a matching image of the same object/subject. If the quality of the input sketch is bad, the output of this model will be poor. This thesis predicts the quality of sketches. The dataset used is called the "Sketchy" dataset, this dataset was originally used to study SBIR. However, the creators of the dataset provided quality labels for the sketches. This allows for quality prediction on this dataset, which has not previously been completed. There are 5 different labels assigned to sketches. One of the experiments completed for this thesis was predicting 1 of the 5 labels for each sketch. The other experiments for this thesis create good and bad labels by combining the 5 labels. The Sketchformer architecture created by Ribeiro et al. is used to run the experiments. The Sketchformer achieves 66% on the 5-label experiment and up to 97% on the good and bad (2-label) experiment. This transformer outperforms a Support Vector Machine baseline on this quality labels. The results of the experiments show that the transformer applied to this dataset is a valuable contribution by surpassing the baseline on multiple tasks. Additionally, accuracy values from these experiments are similar to values found in the corresponding image quality prediction task.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's sketches, as distinguished from his tales, fall into three main types: the essay-sketch, the sketch-proper, and the vignette-sketch. A definition of these works includes a brief discussion of their inception, source, and development, and a study of the individual pieces as representative of types within each of the three main divisions. A consideration of the sketches from their inception through their final form reveals a great deal of the formative process of some of Hawthorne's ideas of literature and of the development of specific techniques to cope with his themes. A study of the sketches as a group and individually provides a clearer basis for a study of Hawthorne's other works.

With the proliferation of touch screens, sketching input has become popular among many software products. This phenomenon has stimulated a new round of boom in free-hand sketch research, covering topics like sketch recognition, sketch-based image retrieval, sketch synthesis and sketch segmentation. Comparing to previous sketch works, the newly proposed works are generally employing more complicated sketches and sketches in much larger quantity, thanks to the advancements in hardware. This thesis thus demonstrates some new works on free-hand sketches, presenting novel thoughts on aforementioned topics. On sketch recognition, Eitz et al. [32] are the first explorers, who proposed the large-scale TU-Berlin sketch dataset [32] that made sketch recognition possible. Following their work, we continue to analyze the dataset and find that the visual cue sparsity and internal structural complexity are the two biggest challenges for sketch recognition. Accordingly, we propose multiple kernel learning [45] to fuse multiple visual cues and star graph representation [12] to encode the structures of the sketches. With the new schemes, we have achieved significant improvement on recognition accuracy (from 56% to 65.81%). Experimental study on sketch attributes is performed to further boost sketch recognition performance and enable novel retrieval-by-attribute applications. For sketch-based image retrieval, we start by carefully examining the existing works. After looking at the big picture of sketch-based image retrieval, we highlight that studying the sketch's ability to distinguish intra-category object variations should be the most promising direction to proceed on, and we define it as the fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval problem. Deformable part-based model which addresses object part details and object deformations is raised to tackle this new problem, and graph matching is employed to compute the similarity between deformable part-based models by matching the parts of different models. To evaluate this new problem, we combine the TU-Berlin sketch dataset and the PASCAL VOC photo dataset [36] to form a new challenging cross-domain dataset with pairwise sketch-photo similarity ratings, and our proposed method has shown promising results on this new dataset. Regarding sketch synthesis, we focus on the generating of real free-hand style sketches for general categories, as the closest previous work [8] only managed to show efficacy on a single category: human faces. The difficulties that impede sketch synthesis to reach other categories include the cluttered edges and diverse object variations due to deformation. To address those difficulties, we propose a deformable stroke model to form the sketch synthesis into a detection process, which is directly aiming at the cluttered background and the object variations. To alleviate the training of such a model, a perceptual grouping algorithm is further proposed that utilizes stroke length's relationship to stroke semantics, stroke temporal order and Gestalt principles [58] to perform part-level sketch segmentation. The perceptual grouping provides semantic part-level supervision automatically for the deformable stroke model training, and an iterative learning scheme is introduced to gradually refine the supervision and the model training. With the learned deformable stroke models, sketches with distinct free-hand style can be generated for many categories.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 96 p. Includes bibliographical references.

The numerous piano figurations, exercises and experimental ideas that are found throughout the leaves of Beethoven’s sketchbooks remain a largely unexplored area within the field of Beethoven sketch-scholarship. Their existence is commonly known, but the purpose for which they served the composer has not been explored fully. Moreover, there has been little attempt to catalogue these ideas in order to make them more accessible and approachable. This study is divided into two parts. Part one provides the biographical context in which the subsequent analysis of the figurations is based. It presents an assessment of Beethoven as a student, performer and teacher by evaluating contemporary sources and including a discussion on performance anxiety. This evidence is used to demonstrate that Beethoven could be prone to lapses in technique; that he undertook his studies with complete dedication; and that he also created exercises for some of his pupils, which supports the notion that a number of the figurations could have been designed as piano exercises. Part two analyses the figurations, classifying them by type and grouping them into themes related to specific areas of piano technique. The analysis establishes that many of the figurations are highly inventive; that occasionally developments can be traced (in particular the evolution of the ‘Beethoven’ trill); and that in many cases there are parallels with Beethoven’s published works for piano, which proves that a single classification for the figurations is often problematic. The analysis further reveals that a significant number of the figurations were written in 1793 and, in conjunction with the earlier biographical study, strongly suggests that Beethoven’s move to Vienna was a major impetus for their creation. Volume two presents a separate catalogue of the transcribed piano figurations, some of which are previously unknown. Within the catalogue, the figurations are arranged by type to correspond with the categories discussed in the analysis and ordered chronologically to enable them to be examined alongside the accompanying text.

Despite many scholars having explored Beethoven’s compositional rhythmic processes, no systematic study has been done in this regard for the sketches for String Quartet Op. 127, and any mention of rhythm in the current literature tends to be incidental. I combine the theories of Rothstein, Krebs and others, an approach that has been more effective in understanding the changes during the compositional process from metrical and hypermetrical perspectives. I examine how Beethoven’s rhythmic patterns add to both musical coherence and contrast. My thesis demonstrates that Beethoven’s starting point is usually a conventional 8- or 16-measure phrase; later, according to the sketches, he makes rhythmic adjustments, such as grouping dissonances, expansions, or displacements, using a variety of parameters. Also added later are rhythmic patterns that individualize each of the four instruments. These processes are found throughout the two movements studied. Therefore, rhythm and its manipulations are used as unifying features.