The article gives a short introduction in computational visualistics and in the field of pictorial syntax. Morphology as a particular sub-domain of linguistic syntax studies is first sketched and then transferred to visualistics, thus leading directly to the theme of the volume: picture morphology as studied in computational visualistics.
Building upon the existing literature, we are suggesting to regard the building blocks of all graphics as falling into three main categories: a) the graphic objects that are shown (e.g. a dot, a pictogram, an arrow), b) the meaningful graphic spaces into which these objects are arranged (e.g. a geographic coordinate system, a timeline), and c) the graphic properties of these objects (e.g. their colors, their sizes). We suggest that graphic objects come in different syntactic categories, such as nodes, labels, frames, links, etc. Such syntactic categories of graphic objects can explain the permissible spatial relationships between objects in a graphic representation. In addition, syntactic categories provide a criterion for distinguishing meaningful basic constituents of graphics. Based on the above, we discuss how the concept of syntactics can be applied to graphics. Finally we distinguish different types of meaningful graphic spaces that can be used to construct graphics. Throughout the paper we relate our proposals to the relevant existing literature.
Autoren: Stefano Borgo, Roberta Ferrario, Claudio Masolo, Alessandro Oltramari
The paper reviews geometrical approaches in the area of qualitative space representation by discussing formal systems of geometry based on the notion of extended regions (mereogeometries). The focus is on primitives that are cognitively motivated and capture different notions of naive geometry. The role of mereogeometries in the domain of picture morphology is then considered, discussing some primitives that are motivated from the cognitive perspective and investigating the issue of granularity and refinement.
Rule-based specifications (formal grammars) like Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) play a prominent role in scientific models of vegetation structure (botanical morphology). The paper gives an overview with many examples. The grammar-based approaches are usually not used for the morphological specification of a picture directly, but for virtual 3-D scenes, which are then rendered visible using standard techniques of geometry-based computer graphics.
This paper presents an overview of the image-morphologic primitives used commonly in non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), a subdomain of computer graphics that is inspired by a long tradition of artistic and illustrative depiction. In particular, we survey NPR shading, stroke-based rendering, sparse line drawings, graftals, and area primitives. Such primitives usually cover larger regions on the canvas and often carry a meaning beyond the color of the image region they represent. This distinguishes them from the pixel as a primitive used in photorealistic rendering which does not have any meaning aside from sampling the color of the image section it represents. We give examples to illustrate the individual techniques and briefly mention how they are tracked though the rendering process as well as represented in the final image.
First, a general description of the visual system and specific processes is described, including layers, pathways and cells in the cortex. Then we illustrate how the cortical image representation can be used for NPR. We conclude with a discussion of image morphology and ontology.
With the advances in digital audio and video analysis, automatic movie summarization has become an important field of research. Much of the work has been put into movie abstracting for large media databases. Looking at the topic from a different side, the movie industry has long since perfected the art of summarization in their advertising trailers to attract an audience. In this paper we introduce the approach of automatically generating entertaining Hollywood-like trailers based on a trailer grammar, enhanced by an ontology. The extraction of features from movies using state-of-the-art image and audio processing techniques builds the foundation for the selection of meaningful and usable material which is re-assembled according to the defined rules. User testing of our automatically produced trailers shows that they are well accepted and in many ways comparable to professionally composed trailers.
As the thematic issue of IMAGE on computational image morphology attempts in particular to mediate between computational visualistics and other disciplines investigating pictures and their uses, the following remarks broaden the perspective again and relate the computational argumentations of the preceding papers to the more general discussion of image science. The two fundamental categories of picture syntax, the geometric base structure and the marker value dimension, are described. They are applied to the questions whether pictures with ill-formed syntax may exist at all, and if so whether they can be dealt with by computers, as well. The overview finally extends the discussion to the limits of pictorial syntax studies.
