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Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-201). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR29323

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Two explanations are proposed for the fact that classical scenes depicting a combat between a Greek warrior and an opponent are composed in a restrained way, in that the actual violence of maiming and killing is not explicitly represented. The first explanation is speculative as a visual parallel with the treatment of violence in classical tragedy, while the second is based on a formal, art historical explanation of a motif derived from Egyptian art. In a concluding section it is pointed out that in Hellenistic art violence becomes explicit in the depictions of war and combat.

The majority of Gallo-Roman reliefs were published in the early 1900s, and since that time there has been no major study undertaken solely on a peculiarly abundant and striking part of the corpus, namely the scenes of vending depicted on funerary monuments. Scholars have tended to concentrate their efforts on scenes of work in general, both in Gaul and in Italy, where another important series of work scenes is found, including vending scenes. Therefore, this thesis focuses on 61 Gallo-Roman reliefs depicting the sale or display of merchandise such as clothing, food, wine and specialty products. These transactions often take place in small, shop-like settings, consisting of a counter, and sometimes shelves or display racks The analysis of the iconography of the vending scenes is of central importance to our understanding of the various occupational roles of the merchants, who range from small scale shop-keepers to commercial wholesalers of products. As many of the reliefs are in relatively poor condition, the comparanda from the Italian series of vending scenes, epigraphic parallels, archaeological finds and literary sources are essential in dealing with problems of interpretation. One problem to be resolved is how closely the Gallo-Roman vending scenes follow the Italian models. Another problem concerns the visual and verbal evidence for the legal and social status of Gallo-Roman vendors. Where did these vendors fit into Gallo-Roman society? Additionally, what do the products displayed in these reliefs reveal about the economy of Roman Gaul? It is the intent of this thesis to demonstrate that the vendors wished to present themselves on their tombs in ways to show that they achieved prosperity and a relatively comfortable status in life through their endeavours in commerce and trade. The best evidence for the actual success of these vendors is given by the large, costly tombs upon which some of the vending scenes are carved. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This study proposes the classification of the toolmark under the heads of zipper teeth as a subclass characteristic as outlined by the Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners (AFTE). Two separate cases in which zipper teeth were found at crime scenes prompted this study. Brass zipper teeth manufactured by YKK were taken from 20 pairs of jeans and studied using a Reichert comparison microscope at 4X power. Photographs were taken and over 750 comparisons made. It was found that the toolmarks on each side on the 20 zippers were unique and independent of all other sides. The observations made in this study indicate that classifying zipper teeth toolmarks as a subclass characteristic is valid.

Ray tracing acceleration methods are usually applied to scenes defined by triangle meshes.These scenes contain a large number of triangles. In contrast, CSG scenes contain orders of magnitude less more complex primitives primitives. In this thesis we will present the Operation KD-tree. This acceleration method applies the KD-tree --- modern acceleration method developed for triangle meshes --- directly to the CSG scene. This is done on the premise, that the huge reduction in primitive count will yield enhanced performance, when rendering a scene using CSG instead of triangle meshes.

With the launch of networked handheld devices which can capture, store, compress, send and display a variety of audiovisual stimuli; high definition television (HDTV); streaming Internet protocol TV (IPTV) and websites such as Youtube, Facebook and Flickr etc., an enormous amount of visual data of visual data is making its way to consumers. Because of this, considerable time and resources are being expanded to ensure that the end user is presented with with a satisfactory quality of experience (QoE). While traditional QoE methods have focused on optimizing delivery networks with respect to throughput, buffer-lengths and capacity, perceptually optimized delivery of multimedia services is also fast gaining importance. This is especially timely given the explosive growth in (especially wireless) video traffic and expected shortfalls in bandwidth. These perceptual approaches attempt to deliver an optimized QoE to the end-user by utilizing objective measures of visual quality. In this thesis, we shall cover a variety of such algorithms that predict overall QoE of an image or a video, depending on the amount of information available for the algorithm design. Typically, quality assessment (QA) algorithms are classiffied on the basis of the amount of information that is available to the algorithm. This thesis will primarily focus on blind QA algorithms, where blind or no-reference (NR) QA refers to automatic quality assessment of an image/video using an algorithm which only utilizes the distorted image/video whose quality is being assessed. NR QA approaches are further classiffied on the basis of whether the algorithm had access to subjective/human opinion prior to deployment. Algorithms which use machine learning techniques along with human judgements of quality during the 'training' phase may be labelled 'opinion aware' algorithms. The first part of the thesis deals with such approaches. While such opinion aware-NR algorithms demonstrate good correlation with human perception on controlled databases, it is impossible to anticipate all of the different distortions that may occur in a practical system and hence train on them. In such cases, it is of interest to design QA algorithms that are not limited in their performance by training data. Approaches which operate without the knowledge of human judgements during the training phase are labelled as 'opinion unaware' (OU) algorithms. We propose such an approach in the second part of the thesis. Further, we propose new VQA algorithms in the last part of the dissertation to address the completely blind VQA problem. The proposed approach quantify disturbances introduced due to distortions and thereby predict the quality of distorted content even without any external knowledge about the pristine natural sources and hence zero shot models. / text

Le but du rendu stylisé est de produire un rendud'une scène 3D dans le style visuel particuliervoulu par un artiste.Cela nécessite de reproduire automatiquementsur ordinateur certaines caractéristiquesd'illustrations traditionnelles: par exemple,la façon dont un artiste représente les ombres et lalumière, les contours des objets, ou bien les coupsde pinceau qui ont servi à créer une peinture.Les problématiques du rendu stylisé sont pertinentesdans des domaines comme la réalisation de films d'animation 3Dou le jeu vidéo, où les studios cherchent de plus en plus à se démarquerpar des styles visuels originaux.Dans cette thèse, nous explorons des techniques destylisation qui peuvent s'intégrer dans des pipelinesde rendu temps-réel existants, et nous proposons deux contributions.La première est un outil de création de modèles d'illuminationstylisés pour des objets 3D.La conception de ces modèles est complexe et coûteuse en temps,car ils doivent produire un résultat cohérentsous une multitude d'angles de vue et d'éclairages.Nous proposons une méthode qui facilite la créationde modèles d'illumination pour le rendu stylisé,en les décomposant en sous-modèles plus simples à manipuler.Notre seconde contribution est un pipeline de rendude scènes 3D dans un style peinture,qui utilise une combinaison de bruits procéduraux 3Det de filtrage en espace écran.Des techniques de filtrage d'image ont déjà été proposéespour styliser des images ou des vidéos:le but de ce travail est d'utiliser ces filtres pourstyliser des scènes 3D tout en gardant la cohérence du mouvement.Cependant, directement appliquer un filtreen espace écran produit des défauts visuels au niveau dessilhouettes des objets.Nous proposons une méthode qui permet d'assurer la cohérence du mouvement,en guidant les filtres d'images avec des informations sur la géométrie extraites de G-buffers, et qui élimine les défauts aux silhouettes. / The goal of stylized rendering is to render 3D scenes in the visual style intended by an artist.This often entails reproducing, with some degree of automation,the visual features typically found in 2D illustrationsthat constitute the "style" of an artist.Examples of these features include the depiction of light and shade,the representation of the contours of objects,or the strokes on a canvas that make a painting.This field is relevant today in domains such as computer-generated animation orvideo games, where studios seek to differentiate themselveswith styles that deviate from photorealism.In this thesis, we explore stylization techniques that can be easilyinserted into existing real-time rendering pipelines, and propose two novel techniques in this domain.Our first contribution is a workflow that aims to facilitatethe design of complex stylized shading models for 3D objects.Designing a stylized shading model that follows artistic constraintsand stays consistent under a variety of lightingconditions and viewpoints is a difficult and time-consuming process.Specialized shading models intended for stylization existbut are still limited in the range of appearances and behaviors they can reproduce.We propose a way to build and experiment with complex shading modelsby combining several simple shading behaviors using a layered approach,which allows a more intuitive and efficient exploration of the design space of shading models.In our second contribution, we present a pipeline to render 3D scenes in painterly styles,simulating the appearance of brush strokes,using a combination of procedural noise andlocal image filtering in screen-space.Image filtering techniques can achieve a wide range of stylized effects on 2D pictures and video:our goal is to use those existing filtering techniques to stylize 3D scenes,in a way that is coherent with the underlying animation or camera movement.This is not a trivial process, as naive approaches to filtering in screen-spacecan introduce visual inconsistencies around the silhouette of objects.The proposed method ensures motion coherence by guiding filters with informationfrom G-buffers, and ensures a coherent stylization of silhouettes in a generic way.