Still today it remains unclear whether Galileo ever climbed the leaning tower of Pisa in order to drop bodies from its top. Some believe that he established the principle of equal speeds for falling bodies by means of an ingenious thought experiment. However, the reconstruction of that thought experiment circulating in the philosophical literature is no more than a cartoon. In this paper I will...

The bag-of-visual-words (BOVW) approaches are widely used in human action recognition. Usually, large vocabulary size of the BOVW is more discriminative for inter-class action classification while small one is more robust to noise and thus tolerant to the intra-class invariance. In this pape, we propose a pyramid vocabulary tree to model local spatio-temporal features, which can characterize th...

We describe a multi-resolution technique for locating for variable structures in images. This is an extension of work on Active Shape Models (ASMs) statistical models which iteratively deform to match image data. An ASM consists of a shape model controlling a set of landmark points, together with a statistical model of the grey-levels expected around each landmark. Both the shape model and the ...

Character design is a key ingredient to the success of any comicbook, graphic novel, or animated feature. Artists typically use shape, size and proportion as the first design layer to express role, physicality and personality traits. In this paper, we propose a knowledge mining framework that extracts primitive shape features from finished art, and trains models with labeled metadata attributes...

This paper introduces a new generalisation of scale-space and pyramids, which combines statistical modelling with a spatial representation. The representation uses the familiar concept of multiple resolutions, but applied to a Gaussian mixture representation of the image hence the title MGMM. It is shown that MGMM can approximate any probability density and can adapt to smooth motions. After a ...