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Examines a series of linked case studies that not only highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing, including hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, but also offer a sensory history of ways of seeing.
Advances in technology allow us to see the invisible: fetal heartbeats, seismic activity, cell mutations, virtual space. Yet in an age when experience is so intensely mediated by visual records, the centuries-old realization that knowledge gained through sight is inherently fallible takes on troubling new dimensions. This book considers the ways in which seeing, over time, has become the foundation for knowing (or at least for what we think we know). A. Joan Saab examines the scientific and socially constructed aspects of seeing in order to delineate a genealogy of visuality from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating that what we see and how we see it are often historically situated and culturally constructed. Through a series of linked case studies that highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing—hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, to name just a few—she interrogates the relationship between “visions” and visuality. This focus on the strange and the wonderful in understanding changing notions of visions and visual culture is a compelling entry point into the increasingly urgent topic of technologically enhanced representations of reality. Accessibly written and thoroughly enlightening, Objects of Vision is a concise history of the connections between seeing and knowing that will appeal to students and teachers of visual studies and sensory, social, and cultural history.
A study on how our eyes function with our brains examines the irrational elements of physical sight and concludes that human seeing transforms both the viewer and the object being viewed.
The typical computational approach to object understanding derives shape information from the 2D outline of the objects. For complex object structures, however, such a planar approach cannot determine object shape; the structural edges have to be encoded in terms of their full 3D spatial configuration. Computer Vision: From Surfaces to 3D Objects is the first book to take a full approach to the challenging issue of veridical 3D object representation. It introduces mathematical and conceptual advances that offer an unprecedented framework for analyzing the complex scene structure of the world. An Unprecedented Framework for Complex Object Representation Presenting the material from both computational and neural implementation perspectives, the book covers novel analytic techniques for all levels of the surface representation problem. The cutting-edge contributions in this work run the gamut from the basic issue of the ground plane for surface estimation through mid-level analyses of surface segmentation processes to complex Riemannian space methods for representing and evaluating surfaces. State-of-the-Art 3D Surface and Object Representation This well-illustrated book takes a fresh look at the issue of 3D object representation. It provides a comprehensive survey of current approaches to the computational reconstruction of surface structure in the visual scene.
Paying attention to the historically specific dimensions of objects such as the photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection, the contributors to this volume offer new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century practices of reading, viewing, and collecting, revealing new readings of Wordsworth, Shelley, James and Wilde, among others.
300 Astronomical Objects is a handy and comprehensive reference to the most interesting celestial objects. It takes readers on a photographic tour through the galaxy, from its solar core to its outer limits, stopping to view all the highlights and give the very latest data about the universe. Convenient sidebars with each entry provide up-to-date facts and figures on every object, including mass, magnitude, density, radius, rotation period, and surface and core temperatures. An annotated cross-section of the object enhances this information, and a full-colour photograph brings the object to life. Additional spreads bring together and explain related objects and phenomena. For example, the corresponding pages for the sun include solar power, sunspots and solar flares. Others examples include: * Mercury and its surface * The asteroid belt and 433 Eros * Jupiter and its moons, including Io, Europa and Callista * Uranus and its rings and moons, including Ariel and Titania * Outer belts and comets, such as Halley's comet, and the Deep Impact mission * Space telescopes, including the International Space Station. * 300 Astronomical Objects is a beautiful and handy reference for the amateur astronomer. AUTHOR: Jamie Wilkins has a degree in astrophysics from Cambridge University. Robert Dunn has a degree in natural sciences, specializing in physics, from Cambridge University, where he is a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy. REVIEWS: Praise for the hardcover edition: Best Books 2007, Junior High and Young Adults, Astronomy "Simply put, this book is a real gem." -- Science Books and Films "A glorious vision of the universe." -- American Reference Books Annual ILLUSTRATIONS 300 + colour illustrations, photos, sidebars and resources *
This book revolutionizes how vision can be taught to undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science, psychology, and optometry. It is the first comprehensive textbook on vision to reflect the integrated computational approach of modern research scientists. This new interdisciplinary approach, called "vision science," integrates psychological, computational, and neuroscientific perspectives. The book covers all major topics related to vision, from early neural processing of image structure in the retina to high-level visual attention, memory, imagery, and awareness. The presentation throughout is theoretically sophisticated yet requires minimal knowledge of mathematics. There is also an extensive glossary, as well as appendices on psychophysical methods, connectionist modeling, and color technology. The book will serve not only as a comprehensive textbook on vision, but also as a valuable reference for researchers in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, optometry, and philosophy.
This Research Topic will focus on how the visual system recognizes objects regardless of variations in the viewpoint, illumination, retinal size, background, etc. Contributors are encouraged to submit articles describing novel results, models, viewpoints, perspectives and/or methodological innovations relevant to this topic. The issues we wish to cover include, but are not limited to, perceptual invariance under one or more of the following types of image variation: • Object shape • Task • Viewpoint (from the translation and rotation of the object relative to the viewer) • Illumination, shading, and shadows • Degree of occlusion • Retinal size • Color • Surface texture • Visual context, including background clutter and crowding • Object motion (including biological motion). Examples of questions that are particularly interesting in this context include, but are not limited to: • Empirical characterizations of properties of invariance: does invariance always exist? How wide is its range and how strong is the tolerance to viewing conditions within this range? • Invariance in naïve vs. experienced subjects: Is invariance built-in or learned? How can it be learned, under which conditions and how effectively? Is it learned incidentally, or are specific task and reward structures necessary for learning? How is generalizability and transfer of learning related to the generalizability/invariance of perception? • Invariance during inference: Are there conditions (e.g. fast presentation time or otherwise resource-constrained recognition) when invariance breaks? • What are some plausible computational or neural mechanisms by which invariance could be achieved?
