The natures of reason and architecture are things man has struggled with since the beginning. As reason evolves and gets more complex, human needs and values change. Interaction among ourselves and surroundings has become a need. Architecture balances this need creating a unifying spirit. This thesis is a collection of work resulting from a struggle that lead to an understanding and appreciation of architecture. / Master of Architecture

composium = compose + symposium The use of a music/architecture analogy is employed in the design of a place for the study of composition. Four models for examination include Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and Arnold Schoenberg. / Master of Architecture

Online sketch recognition uses machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to interpret markings made by users via an electronic stylus or pen. The goal of sketch recognition is to understand the intention and meaning of a particular user's drawing. Diagramming applications have been the primary beneficiaries of sketch recognition technology, as it is commonplace for the users of these tools to rst create a rough sketch of a diagram on paper before translating it into a machine understandable model, using computer-aided design tools, which can then be used to perform simulations or other meaningful tasks. Traditional methods for performing sketch recognition can be broken down into three distinct categories: appearance-based, gesture-based, and geometric-based. Although each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, geometric-based methods have proven to be the most generalizable for multi-domain recognition. Tools, such as the LADDER symbol description language, have shown to be capable of recognizing sketches from over 30 different domains using generalizable, geometric techniques. The LADDER system is limited, however, in the fact that it uses a low-level recognizer that supports only a few primitive shapes, the building blocks for describing higher-level symbols. Systems which support a larger number of primitive shapes have been shown to have questionable accuracies as the number of primitives increase, or they place constraints on how users must input shapes (e.g. circles can only be drawn in a clockwise motion; rectangles must be drawn starting at the top-left corner). This dissertation allows for a significant growth in the possibility of free-sketch recognition systems, those which place little to no drawing constraints on users. In this dissertation, we describe multiple techniques to recognize upwards of 18 primitive shapes while maintaining high accuracy. We also provide methods for producing confidence values and generating multiple interpretations, and explore the difficulties of recognizing multi-stroke primitives. In addition, we show the need for a standardized data repository for sketch recognition algorithm testing and propose SOUSA (sketch-based online user study application), our online system for performing and sharing user study sketch data. Finally, we will show how the principles we have learned through our work extend to other domains, including activity recognition using trained hand posture cues.

This thesis is concerned with the study of how sketch-based systems can be improved to enhance idea generation process in conceptual design stage. It is also concerned with achieving a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to complete the digitization of the design process as sketching phase is still not integrated with other phases due to the different nature of it and the incomplete digitization of sketching phase itself. Previous studies identified three main related issues: sketching process, sketch-based modeling, and the integration between the digitized design phases. Here, the thesis is motivated from the desire to improve sketch-based modeling to support idea generation process but unlike previous studies that only focused on the technical or drawing part of sketching, this thesis attempts to concentrate more on the mental part of the sketching process which play a key role in developing ideas in design. Another motivation of this thesis is to produce a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to enable 3D models produced by sketching to be edited in detailed design stage. As such, there are two main contributions have been addressed in this thesis. The first contribution is the presenting of a new approach in designing sketch-based systems that enable more support for idea generation by separating thinking and developing ideas from the 3D modeling process. This kind of separation allows designers to think freely and concentrate more on their ideas rather than 3D modeling. the second contribution is achieving a kind of integration between gesture-based systems and CAD systems by using an IGES file in exchanging data between systems and a new method to organize data within the file in an order that make it more understood by feature recognition embedded in commercial CAD systems.

Designers usually start their design process by exploring and evolving their ideas rapidly through sketching since this helps them to make numerous attempts at creating, practicing, simulating, and representing ideas. Creativity inherent in solving the ill-defined problems (Eastman, 1969) often emerges when designers explore potential solutions while sketching in the design process (Schön, 1992). When using computer programs such as CAD or Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools, designers often preplan the tasks prior to executing commands instead of engaging in the process of designing. Researchers argue that these programs force designers to focus on how to use a tool (i.e. how to execute series of commands) rather than how to explore a design, and thus hinder creativity in the early stages of the design process (Goel, 1995; Dorta, 2007). Since recent design and documentation works have been computer-generated using BIM software, transitions between ideas in sketches and those in digital CAD systems have become necessary. By employing sketch interactions, we argue that a computer system can provide a rapid, flexible, and iterative method to create 3D models with sufficient data for facilitating smooth transitions between designers’ early sketches and BIM programs. This dissertation begins by describing the modern design workflows and discussing the necessary data to be exchanged in the early stage of design. It then briefly introduces the modern cognitive theories, including embodiment (Varela, Rosch, & Thompson, 1992), situated action (Suchman, 1986), and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995). It continues by identifying problems in current CAD programs used in the early stage of the design process, using these theories as lenses. After reviewing modern attempts, including sketch tools and design automation tools, we describe the design and implementation of a sketch and multi-touch program, SolidSketch, to facilitate and augment our abilities to work on ill-defined problems in the early stage of design. SolidSketch is a parametric modeling program that enables users to construct 3D parametric models rapidly through sketch and multi-touch interactions. It combines the benefits of traditional design tools, such as physical models and pencil sketches (i.e. rapid, low-cost, and flexible methods), with the computational power offered by digital modeling tools, such as CAD. To close the gap between modern BIM and traditional sketch tools, the models created with SolidSketch can be read by other BIM programs. We then evaluate the programs with comparisons to the commercial CAD programs and other sketch programs. We also report a case study in which participants used the system for their design explorations. Finally, we conclude with the potential impacts of this new technology and the next steps for ultimately bringing greater computational power to the early stages of design.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O presente trabalho tem como principal objetivo pensar e investigar o desenho como processo, a partir do caderno de artista, de forma a resgatar as ressonâncias pessoais do autor com sua obra, não como resultado, e sim como um meio que se faz pensar, experimentar, errar e projetar um determinado trabalho e seus desdobramentos. O relato e a apresentação do processo de criação, a desconstrução e a desnaturalização dos próprios padrões estéticos através da prática desencadeada de desenho-croquis no próprio caderno de artista, serão o foco dessa pesquisa. Por fim, aborda-se um breve percurso do desenho e do caderno de artista focando a produção em minhas experiências pessoais com relação ao desenho e a moda, juntamente com o projeto prático a ser apresentado / The present study aims to investigate the design and thinking as a process, from the artist tender in order to redeem the personal resonances of the author with his work, not as a result, but as a medium that makes you think, experience , mistakes and design a particular job and its development. The report and the presentation of the creation process, deconstruction and denaturalization own aesthetic standards through practice-triggered drawing sketches in the notebook of the artist himself, will be the focus of this research. Finally, it approaches a short journey from the design and specifications of the production photographer focusing on my personal experiences with the design and fashion, along with practical design to be presented

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O presente trabalho tem como principal objetivo pensar e investigar o desenho como processo, a partir do caderno de artista, de forma a resgatar as ressonâncias pessoais do autor com sua obra, não como resultado, e sim como um meio que se faz pensar, experimentar, errar e projetar um determinado trabalho e seus desdobramentos. O relato e a apresentação do processo de criação, a desconstrução e a desnaturalização dos próprios padrões estéticos através da prática desencadeada de desenho-croquis no próprio caderno de artista, serão o foco dessa pesquisa. Por fim, aborda-se um breve percurso do desenho e do caderno de artista focando a produção em minhas experiências pessoais com relação ao desenho e a moda, juntamente com o projeto prático a ser apresentado / The present study aims to investigate the design and thinking as a process, from the artist tender in order to redeem the personal resonances of the author with his work, not as a result, but as a medium that makes you think, experience , mistakes and design a particular job and its development. The report and the presentation of the creation process, deconstruction and denaturalization own aesthetic standards through practice-triggered drawing sketches in the notebook of the artist himself, will be the focus of this research. Finally, it approaches a short journey from the design and specifications of the production photographer focusing on my personal experiences with the design and fashion, along with practical design to be presented

La détection précoce de foyers de scolytes est une étape déterminante des opérations phytosanitaires qui doivent permettre de réduire l’impact indirect des tempêtes sur les forêts de conifères, en particulier l’impact du typographe sur les pessières. Cette détection doit idéalement être efficace, précise et économique. La présente thèse portait sur le typographe, Ips typographus, en pessière dans le massif vosgien. Elle visait à étudier et à comparer les performances en termes de précision (détection, localisation et inventaire), de coût et de rapidité de mise en œuvre de différentes méthodes de détection: la surveillance au sol, la détection aéroportée par un observateur embarqué (hélicoptère et ULM), et la télédétection (photographies aérienne infrarouge et imagerie satellitaire à haute et très haute résolution). Dans le chapitre « techniques de détection au sol », nous avons évalué plusieurs méthodes de suivi (par transects, le long des routes carrossables et chemins forestiers, des courbes de niveau, à partir des foyers antérieurs, le long de parcours conditionnels liés aux foyers observés). Leurs performances ont été estimées via des simulations sous SIG (système d’information géographique) et les trajets qui ont présenté les meilleurs résultats ont ensuite fait l’objet d’une validation sur le terrain. Il en ressort que ce sont les trajets le long des routes carrossables et chemins forestiers ainsi que les trajets conditionnels qui présentent les meilleurs rapports efficacité/rendement dans la détection des foyers de scolytes. Le choix d’une de ces méthodes dépendra de la taille minimum des foyers que l’on veut observer. Nous avons ensuite évalué, dans le chapitre « détection aéroportée », les performances de techniques d’observations de foyers réalisées par un observateur embarqué à bord d’un hélicoptère et d’un ULM. Une première étape a consisté à optimaliser toute une série de paramètres de vol pour les deux types d’appareils afin de permettre à l’observateur embarqué d’être dans les meilleures conditions d’observation. Ensuite, nous avons évalué la précision de détection en fonction de divers types de trajets en ULM et hélicoptère. D’après nos résultats, les observations recueillies à l’aide des deux sortes appareils n’ont pas permis de détecter de manière satisfaisante les foyers de scolytes quelque soit le type de trajet utilisé. Ces résultats sont sans-doute dus, en partie, à la faible expérience des observateurs embarqués mais également aux caractéristiques spatiales des foyers d’infestation qui ne facilitent pas leur détection par ce genre de méthode. Enfin, dans le chapitre « télédétection », nous avons évalué les performances qu’offrent (1) des séries temporelles d’images SPOT, (2) la photographie aérienne infrarouge et (3) des images Quickbird dans la détection de foyers de scolytes. Pour tous ces types d’images, nous avons estimé la précision d’une classification automatique des foyers d’infestation, réalisée à partir de leurs caractéristiques spectrales, texturales et environnementales, par rapport aux autres éléments présents sur l’image. Ces analyses ont mis en évidence qu’il est possible d’atteindre une précision de classification relativement bonne (>80%) des foyers d’infestation sur des photographies aériennes et sur des images satellites à très haute résolution spatiale (Quickbird) grâce à des techniques de segmentation et de classification par arbre de décision. Par contre, il ne nous a pas été possible de déterminer de façon satisfaisante la précision de classification des images SPOT (haute résolution spatiale). Les résultats détaillés de chacune de ces méthodes de détections sont développés dans les différents chapitres de cette thèse. La discussion générale met ceux-ci en relation en abordant leurs avantages et inconvénients respectifs, et aborde les perspectives découlant de nos résultats.

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.

Computational theories of structure-from-motion and stereo vision only specify the computation of three-dimensional surface information at points in the image at which the irradiance changes. Yet, the visual perception is clearly of complete surfaces, and this perception is consistent for different observers. Since mathematically the class of surfaces which could pass through the known boundary points provided by the stereo system is infinite and contains widely varying surfaces, the visual system must incorporate some additional constraints besides the known points in order to compute the complete surface. Using the image irradiance equation, we derive the surface consistency constraint, informally referred to as no news is good news. The constraint implies that the surface must agree with the information from stereo or motion correspondence, and not vary radically between these points. An explicit form of this surface consistency constraint is derived, by relating the probability of a zero-crossing in a region of the image to the variation in the local surface orientation of the surface, provided that the surface albedo and the illumination are roughly constant. The surface consistency constraint can be used to derive an algorithm for reconstructing the surface that "best" fits the surface information provided by stereo or motion correspondence.