A presente dissertação consiste na comparação dos romances Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas e Confissões do impostor Felix Krull. Procuramos analisar os aspectos que os aproximam, apesar do afastamento temporal e cultural entre eles existente, partindo dos elementos que imitam o texto autobiográfico e suas respectivas implicações. Tanto as vidas representadas nos dois romances afastam-se do que se entende por uma biografia normal, como também a particular tarefa autobiográfica realizada por Felix e Brás foge do padrão de confissões e de memórias. A confiabilidade dos narradores pode ser ainda questionada, haja vista suas singulares condições enquanto narradores: um, impostor, e outro, defunto. Esta dissertação é composta por seis partes, nas quais se discutirão os seguintes aspectos: introdução à análise comparativa, os romances e os narradores, a intertextualidade inserida na forma e na temática, o decurso de vida de Brás e Felix, suas condições como autobiógrafos e o papel do leitor. No que diz respeito a este último aspecto, podemos afirmar que como o romance em geral, Memórias póstumas e Confissões, que simulam o relato autobiográfico, se preocupam com a função do público. Nos dois livros em questão, essa preocupação reflete-se nos papéis do leitor inseridos nas narrativas. Nossa dissertação ocupar-se-á desse aspecto como último e com particular atenção, visando analisar as reflexões metanarrativas realizadas pelos narradores diante de seus respectivos leitores no horizonte da autobiografia ficcional. / The following degree thesis consists in comparing the novels Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas and Confissões do impostor Felix Krull. We attempted to analyse the aspects, which approach them, despite of the temporal and cultural distance between them, initiating from the elements, which imitate the autobiographical text and its respective implications. The lives represented in both novels diverge from what usually can be understood as a normal biography. In a similar way the autobiographical function assumed by Felix and Brás diverges from the ideal standard of the confession and the autobiographical memory. The reliability of the narrators can be also questioned if we considerate their singular conditions as narrators: one, as impostor, the other, as a dead person. This thesis is composed of six parts, in that we will discuss the following aspects: an introduction to the comparative analysis, the novels and their narrators, the intertextuality introduced in the form and in the subject, Brás and Felix life events, their condition as autobiographers and the readers role. Like the novels in general, Memórias póstumas e Confissões, that simulate the autobiographical narrative, attend to the role of the attendance. In both analised books this concern is reflected on the the readers inserted in the narratives. This dissertation handles this aspect lastly, trying to analyse the Felix and Brás metanarrative considerations according to their respective readers in the horizon of the fictional autobiography.

A presente dissertação consiste na comparação dos romances Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas e Confissões do impostor Felix Krull. Procuramos analisar os aspectos que os aproximam, apesar do afastamento temporal e cultural entre eles existente, partindo dos elementos que imitam o texto autobiográfico e suas respectivas implicações. Tanto as vidas representadas nos dois romances afastam-se do que se entende por uma biografia normal, como também a particular tarefa autobiográfica realizada por Felix e Brás foge do padrão de confissões e de memórias. A confiabilidade dos narradores pode ser ainda questionada, haja vista suas singulares condições enquanto narradores: um, impostor, e outro, defunto. Esta dissertação é composta por seis partes, nas quais se discutirão os seguintes aspectos: introdução à análise comparativa, os romances e os narradores, a intertextualidade inserida na forma e na temática, o decurso de vida de Brás e Felix, suas condições como autobiógrafos e o papel do leitor. No que diz respeito a este último aspecto, podemos afirmar que como o romance em geral, Memórias póstumas e Confissões, que simulam o relato autobiográfico, se preocupam com a função do público. Nos dois livros em questão, essa preocupação reflete-se nos papéis do leitor inseridos nas narrativas. Nossa dissertação ocupar-se-á desse aspecto como último e com particular atenção, visando analisar as reflexões metanarrativas realizadas pelos narradores diante de seus respectivos leitores no horizonte da autobiografia ficcional. / The following degree thesis consists in comparing the novels Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas and Confissões do impostor Felix Krull. We attempted to analyse the aspects, which approach them, despite of the temporal and cultural distance between them, initiating from the elements, which imitate the autobiographical text and its respective implications. The lives represented in both novels diverge from what usually can be understood as a normal biography. In a similar way the autobiographical function assumed by Felix and Brás diverges from the ideal standard of the confession and the autobiographical memory. The reliability of the narrators can be also questioned if we considerate their singular conditions as narrators: one, as impostor, the other, as a dead person. This thesis is composed of six parts, in that we will discuss the following aspects: an introduction to the comparative analysis, the novels and their narrators, the intertextuality introduced in the form and in the subject, Brás and Felix life events, their condition as autobiographers and the readers role. Like the novels in general, Memórias póstumas e Confissões, that simulate the autobiographical narrative, attend to the role of the attendance. In both analised books this concern is reflected on the the readers inserted in the narratives. This dissertation handles this aspect lastly, trying to analyse the Felix and Brás metanarrative considerations according to their respective readers in the horizon of the fictional autobiography.

This master’s thesis work was performed at Optimum Biometric Labs, OBL, located in Karlskrona, Sweden. Optimum Biometric Labs perform independent scenario evaluations to companies who develop biometric devices. The company has a product Optimum preConTM which is surveillance and diagnosis tool for biometric systems. This thesis work’s objective was to develop a conceptual model and implement it as an additional layer above the biometric layer with intelligence about the biometric users. The layer is influenced by the general procedure of biometrics in a multimodal behavioural way. It is working in an unsupervised way and performs in an unsupervised manner. While biometric systems are increasingly adopted the technologies have some inherent problems such as false match and false non-match. In practice, a rejected user can not be interpreted as an impostor since the user simply might have problems using his/her biometric feature. The proposed methods in this project are dealing with these problems when analysing biometric usage in runtime. Another fact which may give rise to false rejections is template aging; a phenomenon where the enrolled user’s template is too old compared towards the user’s current biometric feature. A theoretical approach of template aging was known; however since the analysis of template aging detection was correlated with potential system flaws such as device defects or human generated risks such as impostor attacks this task would become difficult to solve in an unsupervised system but when ignoring the definition of template aging, the detection of similar effects was possible. One of the objectives of this project was to detect template aging in a predictive sense; this task failed to be carried out because the absence of basis performing this kind of tasks. The developed program performs abnormality detection at each incoming event from a biometric system. Each verification attempt is assumed to be from a genuine user unless any deviation according to the user's history is found, an abnormality. The possibility of an impostor attack depends on the degree of the abnormality. The application makes relative decisions between fraud possibilities or if genuine user was the source of what caused the deviations. This is presented as an alarm with the degree of impostor possibility. This intelligent layer has increased Optimum preCon´s capacity as a surveillance tool for biometrics. This product is an efficient complement to biometric systems in a steady up-going worldwide market.

Clouds are ubiquitous and ever-changing feature of the outdoors. They are an integral factor in Earth's weather systems. Component of water circulation in a nature and a strong indicator of weather patterns and changes. Clouds are important component of the visual simulation of any outdoor scene, but the complexity of cloud formation, dynamics, and light interaction makes cloud simulation and rendering difficult in real time. In an interactive flight simulation, users would like to fly in and around realistic, volumetric clouds. I Present, two main ways of representation cloud in computer graphic, where one way use for modelling Perlin noise and second one use for modelling fluid dynamic system.

<div>In conventional computer graphics and visualization, images are synthesized following the planar pinhole camera (PPC) model. The PPC approximates physical imaging devices such as cameras and the human eye, which sample the scene with linear rays that originate from a single viewpoint, i.e. the pinhole. In addition, the PPC takes a snapshot of the scene, sampling it at a single instant in time, or timepoint, for each image. Images synthesized with these single viewpoint and single timepoint constraints are familiar to the user, as they emulate images captured with cameras or perceived by the human visual system. However, visualization using the PPC model suffers from the limitation of occlusion, when a region of interest (ROI) is not visible due to obstruction by other data. The conventional solution to the occlusion problem is to rely on the user to change the view interactively to gain line of sight to the scene ROIs. This approach of sequential navigation has the shortcomings of (1) inefficiency, as navigation is wasted when circumventing an occluder does not reveal an ROI, (2) inefficacy, as a moving or a transient ROI can hide or disappear before the user reaches it, or as scene understanding requires visualizing multiple distant ROIs in parallel, and (3) user confusion, as back-and-forth navigation for systematic scene exploration can hinder spatio-temporal awareness.</div><div><br></div><div>In this thesis we propose a novel paradigm for handling occlusions in visualization based on generalizing an image to incorporate samples from multiple viewpoints and multiple timepoints. The image generalization is implemented at camera model level, by removing the same timepoint restriction, and by removing the linear ray restriction, allowing for curved rays that are routed around occluders to reach distant ROIs. The paradigm offers the opportunity to greatly increase the information bandwidth of images, which we have explored in the context of both desktop and head-mounted display visualization, as needed in virtual and augmented reality applications. The challenges of multi-viewpoint multi-timepoint visualization are (1) routing the non-linear rays to find all ROIs or to reach all known ROIs, (2) making the generalized image easy to parse by enforcing spatial and temporal continuity and non-redundancy, (3) rendering the generalized images quickly as required by interactive applications, and (4) developing algorithms and user interfaces for the intuitive navigation of the compound cameras with tens of degrees of freedom. We have addressed these challenges (1) by developing a multiperspective visualization framework based on a hierarchical camera model with PPC and non-PPC leafs, (2) by routing multiple inflection point rays with direction coherence, which enforces visualization continuity, and without intersection, which enforces non-redundancy, (3) by designing our hierarchical camera model to provide closed-form projection, which enables porting generalized image rendering to the traditional and highly-efficient projection followed by rasterization pipeline implemented by graphics hardware, and (4) by devising naturalistic user interfaces based on tracked head-mounted displays that allow deploying and retracting the additional perspectives intuitively and without simulator sickness.</div>

Submitted by Setor de Tratamento da Informa??o - BC/PUCRS (tede2@pucrs.br) on 2016-03-11T12:15:46Z No. of bitstreams: 1 TES_ALEXANDRE_COSTI_PANDOLFO_COMPLETO.pdf: 1092322 bytes, checksum: ac82eb1aeaaddb2a96a668740314f72f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-11T12:15:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TES_ALEXANDRE_COSTI_PANDOLFO_COMPLETO.pdf: 1092322 bytes, checksum: ac82eb1aeaaddb2a96a668740314f72f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-01-27 / This is an essay of aesthetic expression written for doctoral thesis purposes, and it explores the work Confessions of Felix Krull, from Thomas Mann. In order to understand this particular work from Thomas Mann, the author also permeates other works by the german writer. The analysis has its central philosophical basis on the Aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. The main concepts worked in this writing are mimesis, subjectivity and the idea of natural history. Another concepts such as essay, constellation, montage and model are also mobilized to understand the object of the thesis. The objective is to comprehend a particular structure of the hegemonic language in the western world, taking into consideration this singular work from Thomas Mann, which he had started writing in 1910 and finally published in 1954. The work was divided into three axes of analysis: one on the expression and language of the Confessions, the other on the narrator subject and on the impostor who confesses, and, finally, the analysis of a scene where the author sought uniqueness as critical and dialectical expression. / Trata-se de um ensaio de express?o est?tica, escrito para fins de tese de doutorado, que versa sobre a obra Confiss?es do impostor Felix Krull, de Thomas Mann. Para a compreens?o dessa obra espec?fica o autor perpassa tamb?m por outras obras do escritor alem?o. A an?lise tem como base filos?fica central a Teoria est?tica de Theodor Adorno. Os principais conceitos abordados nesse trabalho s?o a m?mesis, a subjetividade e a ideia de hist?ria natural. Outros conceitos como ensaio, constela??o, montagem e modelo tamb?m s?o mobilizados para a compreens?o do objeto de tese. Objetiva-se compreender uma determinada estrutura de linguagem hegem?nica no mundo ocidental, a partir desta obra singular, cujo in?cio foi escrito em 1910 e publicada finalmente no ano de 1954. O trabalho foi estruturado em tr?s eixos de an?lise: um sobre a express?o e a linguagem das Confiss?es, outro sobre o sujeito narrador e impostor que confessa e, por fim, a an?lise de uma cena, buscando a singularidade como express?o cr?tica e dial?tica.

There is enough rendering power to draw more than only simple indoor scenes today and it can produce very realistic images of landscape with vegetation. Moreover, there are new sophisticated methods for generating of such landscape and simulation of plants ecosystem. This text explains few algorithms for generating and methods for interactive rendering of landscape and vegetation.

The paper describes a theoretical base and realization of realistic volumetric clouds visualization in an environment of real-time simulator. The first part is concerned with a meteorological background of this problem. I show international classification of ten basic cloud types including a short description and cases of occurence. The following part is concerned with an interaction between cloudiness and simulation core, which is based on the fact, that each cloud acts as a mechanical or an electromagnetic obstacle. This should be considered on some way in simulation. The next part describes technologies and practical implementations of visualization and evaluates their characteristics. Finally, the last chapter describes my implementation and tries to outline project advancement.

Lisa Markley, a.k.a. "Miz Markley", is a genuinely happy person even if she is not particularly financially successful as a musician. In an effort to validate my own choices as an artist, I chose to follow her. What was intended to be a portrait of a working musician, becomes instead a feminist musical essay film about the transformative power of art making.

The focus of this thesis is on facial biometrics; specifically in the problems of face detection and face recognition. Despite intensive research over the last 20 years, the technology is not foolproof, which is why we do not see use of face recognition systems in critical sectors such as banking. In this thesis, we focus on three sub-problems in these two areas of research. Firstly, we propose methods to improve the speed-accuracy trade-off of the state-of-the-art face detector. Secondly, we consider a problem that is often ignored in the literature: to decrease the training time of the detectors. We propose two techniques to this end. Thirdly, we present a detailed large-scale study on self-updating face recognition systems in an attempt to answer if continuously changing facial appearance can be learnt automatically. / L'objectiu d'aquesta tesi és sobre biometria facial, específicament en els problemes de detecció de rostres i reconeixement facial. Malgrat la intensa recerca durant els últims 20 anys, la tecnologia no és infalible, de manera que no veiem l'ús dels sistemes de reconeixement de rostres en sectors crítics com la banca. En aquesta tesi, ens centrem en tres sub-problemes en aquestes dues àrees de recerca. En primer lloc, es proposa mètodes per millorar l'equilibri entre la precisió i la velocitat del detector de cares d'última generació. En segon lloc, considerem un problema que sovint s'ignora en la literatura: disminuir el temps de formació dels detectors. Es proposen dues tècniques per a aquest fi. En tercer lloc, es presenta un estudi detallat a gran escala sobre l'auto-actualització dels sistemes de reconeixement facial en un intent de respondre si el canvi constant de l'aparença facial es pot aprendre de forma automàtica.