Towards condition-invariant, top-down visual place recognition

In this paper we present a novel place recognition algorithm inspired by recent discoveries in human visual neuroscience. The algorithm combines intolerant but fast low resolution whole image matching with highly tolerant, sub-image patch matching processes. The approach does not require prior training and works on single images (although we use a cohort normalization score to exploit temporal frame information), alleviating the need for either a velocity signal or image sequence, differentiating it from current state of the art methods. We demonstrate the algorithm on the challenging Alderley sunny day – rainy night dataset, which has only been previously solved by integrating over 320 frame long image sequences. The system is able to achieve 21.24% recall at 100% precision, matching drastically different day and night-time images of places while successfully rejecting match hypotheses between highly aliased images of different places. The results provide a new benchmark for single image, condition-invariant place recognition.

Do look now : re-imagining and re-purposing audiovisual creative practice

The appropriation and elaborate re-working of mediated images and sound stand in a fluid relationship with established notions such as creativity, originality and artistic freedom. The evocative, recontextualised montage works of the eminent video artists Christian Marclay (The Clock) and Tracey Moffatt (Other; Love) may be viewed critically in the light of several theorists’ work, such as Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the crisis of reproduction and reactivation. The ironic pastiche, Do Look Now, a recent video installation work, is presented here as a similar dialogical intervention, representing a subversive deconstruction and critique of filmic codes and conventions, as well as being a new work crafted out of old film clips. (The films quoted in the work are listed here in an Appendix). These practical provocations are framed within a renewed, ‘queering’ investigation of creative works. Such an exploration is, arguably, both illuminating and liberating for particular practitioners and researchers engaged with the unpredictable intersections of creative meaning-making in a heavily legalised, mediated and digitised world.