Image‐Based Modelling from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Photogrammetry: An Effective,Low‐Cost Tool for Archaeological Applications

The recording and 3D modelling of complex archaeological sites is usually associated with high capital and logistical costs, because the data acquisition must be performed by specialists using expensive surveying sensors (i.e., terrestrial laser scanners, robotic total stations and/or ground‐penetrating radar). This paper presents a novel, low‐cost, user‐friendly photogrammetric tool for generating high‐resolution and scaled 3D models of complex sites. The results obtained with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry of an archaeological site indicate that this approach is semi‐automatic, inexpensive and effective, and that it guarantees quality.     

基于视觉的明清古家具数字文化档案高精度三维重建

文物是人类在社会活动中遗留的具有历史、艺术、科学价值的遗物和遗迹。优秀物质文化遗产的体系庞大、内容繁杂,数字化三维重建是保存、管理文物的一种切实可行的方案,对文化传承意义深远。相比于三维激光扫描、结构光技术等在成本和效率方面都有待改进的现有方法,数字近景摄影测量在确保低成本、高效率的同时,还能够满足数据的精度要求和详细程度。如何应用摄影测量技术对文物进行高效三维重建,实现纹理、部件、结构的精细化描述,并综合管理文物以便线上欣赏、未来修复与辅助断代,对优秀物质文化遗产的保护与传承至关重要。 本研究提出了基于视觉的三维建模方案,分为明清家具分层管理体系构建、高效率数据采集与精细化三维重建、高精度三维数字文化档案建设三步。首先针对明清家具的文化特点,从类别、纹饰、部件出发进行分层分类管理,构建独特编码体系;其次基于数字近景摄影测量技术,提出了对明清家具进行非接触数据采集的低成本高效率方法,进行高精度三维重建;再次从三维信息中提取家具纹饰、部件、结构特征,以编码为依据建立索引,为三维数字文化档案的建设提供信息基础;最后设计分层索引结构,建设高精度数字文化档案,搭建互联网共享平台进行展示。 以100套明清古家具袖珍模型为实例进行精细化数字建模,基于数字近景摄影测量技术,将模型精度控制在毫米级别,完成了文物要素提取、分类体系搭建、属性信息管理与索引结构设计,构建了历史文化和三维模型融合的数字文化档案。研究结果表明,基于视觉的非接触视觉处理算法能够实现高精度三维重建,提出的技术方案能够保留模型的细节程度,并且降低了成本、提升了效率,对文物类别、部件、纹饰的属性管理与索引架构能有效管理文化信息,数字文化档案兼具科技、人文与传统美学,满足文物保护需求。明清家具三维数字文化档案可用于古家具的研究,有利于中国古代家具工艺的传承,而其中对于家具的历史年代的介绍鉴别能够辅助断代。下一步将考虑运用人工智能对家具纹饰和部件进行元素组合,生成个性化定制家具。同时将完善技术方案,应用范围拓展至小型文物,支撑数字博物馆建设。     

Modern witnesses: foreign correspondents, geopolitical vision, and the First World War

The First World War was the first modern, mediated conflict. In this paper I argue that British correspondents on the Western front attempting to accurately witness the war encountered a crisis of representation and visuality. They occupied a particularly unstable position between the many sites and points of view within a cubist landscape of shattered geographies and unstable boundaries. Their writings, though rich in masculinist and nationalistic accounts of heroism, also contain a newer perspective characterized by the failure to fit these older narratives into the inhuman, incomprehensible spaces of modern war.     

The disparate histories of binocular vision and binaural hearing

Vision and hearing are dependent on disparities of spatial patterns received by two eyes and on time and intensity differences to two ears. However, the experiences of a single world have masked attention to these disparities. While eyes and ears are paired, there has not been parity in the attention directed to their functioning. Phenomena involving binocular vision were commented upon since antiquity whereas those about binaural hearing are much more recent. This history is compared with respect to the experimental manipulations of dichoptic and dichotic stimuli and the instruments used to stimulate the paired organs. Binocular color mixing led to studies of binaural hearing and direction and distance in visual localization were analyzed before those for auditory localization. Experimental investigations began in the nineteenth century with the invention of instruments like the stereoscope and pseudoscope, soon to be followed by their binaural equivalents, the stethophone and pseudophone.     

Heinrich Klüver and the temporal lobe syndrome*

Abstract

Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy described a constellation of symptoms in monkeys following large resections of the temporal lobe that they termed the “temporal lobe syndrome”; now commonly referred to as the Klüver‐Bucy syndrome. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to review Heinrich Klüver's behavioral studies on monkeys that led up to his temporal lobe experiments with Paul Bucy; (2) to understand why Brown and Schäfer dismissed the behavioral changes in temporal lobe monkeys they had observed fifty years prior to the studies of Klüver and Bucy; and (3) to show that Klüver's phenomenologically motivated conceptual paradigm helped to unify both neuropsychological and neuroanatomical theories regarding the visual and emotive functions of the non‐human primate temporal lobe.     

Capturing Motion and Depth Before Cinematography

Visual representations of biological states have traditionally faced two problems: they lacked motion and depth. Attempts were made to supply these wants over many centuries, but the major advances were made in the early-nineteenth century. Motion was synthesized by sequences of slightly different images presented in rapid succession and depth was added by presenting slightly different images to each eye. Apparent motion and depth were combined some years later, but they tended to be applied separately. The major figures in this early period were Wheatstone, Plateau, Horner, Duboscq, Claudet, and Purkinje. Others later in the century, like Marey and Muybridge, were stimulated to extend the uses to which apparent motion and photography could be applied to examining body movements. These developments occurred before the birth of cinematography, and significant insights were derived from attempts to combine motion and depth.     

Procedures and complications in late-nineteenth-century experimental neuroanatomical research exemplified by articles of Henry Herbert Donaldson (1857–1938)

Henry Herbert Donaldson (1857–1938) was a leader in neurological research in the United States for several decades, beginning about 1890. A detailed account of three of his earliest publications shows the neuroanatomical procedures involved in the study of the relation of brain and intelligence during the late-nineteenth-century in America. Two of the articles, published in September 1890 and December 1891, were titled, “Anatomical Observations on the Brain and Several Sense-Organs of the Blind Deaf-Mute, Laura Dewy Bridgman (1829–1889)”; the third, published in August 1892, used the information from the first two to delimit the extent of the visual processing area of the human cortex. Donaldson’s procedures included brain cuttings and measures of macroscopic brain structures, histology of cellular structures, attempts to relate macroscopic brain structures with brain functions, data corrections, estimations, comparisons, and statistics. These procedures provide a view of the relative thoroughness, accuracy, and comparability of the various neuroanatomical techniques in use at that time and of Donaldson’s implementation of the techniques. Donaldson’s brain cutting techniques were much more comparable than his measurement techniques. The latter could be quite precise, but they were fraught with lack of standardized procedures that made corrections and estimations necessary when making data comparisons across studies. Donaldson emphasized these incompatibilities, implying a need for standardization. Statistical procedures were the least thorough and effective. His, and the field’s, total complement of statistical techniques consisted of mean and range, which severely limited his ability to make complicated assessments. This limitation was not necessarily supplemented by stringent control group comparisons.     

Editorial: The Sympathetic Agnostic: Britain's Next Prime Minister

Abstract

This essay engages the "politics of vision" as a potential template for choosing future presidents. The rhetoric of "vision" is drawn from theological precepts that are grounded in prophetic and transformational discourses. The current politics of popularity, and the reality show atmosphere that surrounds presidential elections, have not held the nation in good stead. We labor under the myth of our own goodness and believe that it doesn't matter who runs the nation, since the balance of power between the branches of government, and a free activist press will protect us from our own bad choices. Recent history proves that we must pay more attention to the criteria by which individuals are selected, because twenty-first-century high stakes political strategies can neutralize even the best laid plans of the nation's founders. To analyze the criteria for selecting future presidents, I turn to the work of writer/activist James Baldwin, theologian/activist William Stringfellow, and ethicist/politician Barbara Jordan. They conclude that vision does not require a crystal ball, just prophetic discourse and moral responsibility. The next President of the United States should be a spiritually mature truth-teller, whose vision for America is congruent with the hopes and dreams of a weary electorate.