Phiction : lies, illusion and the phantasm in photography

A touring exhibition of historic, modern and contemporary photographs from the collection of Horsham Regional Art Gallery, selected by curator James McArdle. His selection included photographs from the 19th century, with an emphasis on photographs which are not what they seem. The exhibition was designed to make us 'read' photographs more precisely, and appreciate the art of the photographer. This exhibition celebrated the originality and diversity of Australian vision in image and text.

Thermal analysis of nanofluids in microfluidics using an infrared camera

We present the thermal analysis of liquid containing Al2O3 nanoparticles in a microfluidic platform using an infrared camera. The small dimensions of the microchannel along with the low flow rates (less than 120 μl min−1) provide very low Reynolds numbers of less than 17.5, reflecting practical parameters for a microfluidic cooling platform. The heat analysis of nanofluids has never been investigated in such a regime, due to the deficiencies of conventional thermal measurement systems. The infrared camera allows non-contact, three dimensional and high resolution capability for temperature profiling. The system was studied at different w/w concentrations of thermally conductive Al2O3 nanoparticles and the experiments were in excellent agreement with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.

Quantitative determination of fatty acid compositions in micro-encapsulated fish-oil supplements using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy

The research describes a rapid method for the determination of fatty acid (FA) contents in a micro-encapsulated fish-oil (μEFO) supplement by using attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopic technique and partial least square regression (PLSR) analysis. Using the ATR-FTIR technique, the μEFO powder samples can be directly analysed without any pre-treatment required, and our developed PLSR strategic approach based on the acquired spectral data led to production of a good linear calibration with R^₂ = 0.99. In addition, the subsequent predictions acquired from an independent validation set for the target FA compositions (i.e., total oil, total omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA) were highly accurate when compared to the actual values obtained from standard GC-based technique, with plots between predicted versus actual values resulting in excellent linear fitting (R² ⩾ 0.96) in all cases. The study therefore demonstrated not only the substantial advantage of the ATR-FTIR technique in terms of rapidness and cost effectiveness, but also its potential application as a rapid, potentially automated, online monitoring technique for the routine analysis of FA composition in industrial processes when used together with the multivariate.

Focus on photography: Wilkins, Clayfield, Sirianni

Curated by Liza McCosh, an exhibition of photographic artworks by John Wilkins, Peter Clayfield and Mick Sirriani, exhibited at SCOPE Galleries, Warrnambool.  The exhibition surveyed a range of processes and included portraiture, landscape, urbanscape and experimental photography on paper and aluminium.

Retake Melbourne : mobile application for re-photography and comparative imaging research

A project of interpretive and comparative re-photography, making use of the collection of Mark Strizic's images and the documents related to his career, held by the State Library, as a basis. Strizic died in 2012. It is now 50 years since his work began to illustrate the period of the 1960s when architecture of the Gold Rush era coexisted side-by-side with, and was being replaced by, curtain-glass high-rise office buildings. It is the position of the researchers that not sufficient attention has been given to Mark Strizic’s reaction to what he saw as a plague of ugliness pervading Australian city-scapes, developing a distinctive aesthetic that in turn made his work useful to commentators like Robin Boyd and David Saunders. Strizic operated from a unique perspective as a migrant with an architectural heritage from his father Zdenko, prominent architecture professor in Croatia, and visiting professor of architecture at Melbourne University in the 1960s. Precise re-photography alongside creative work will enable a comparison of Melbourne now with fifty years ago. The public will be able to participate in and contribute to the project via a crowd-funded custom-made app. Half a century has passed since Strizic made his photographs of Melbourne. In so many cases buildings have disappeared or altered, streetscapes have changed and the appearance of Melburnians have changed as have their habits of using the city. A selection of Strizic’s photographs of Melbourne locations can be rephotographed by the public using the methods devised by Mark Klett, assisted by the app software. This will provide a core of documentary imagery of benefit in framing and completing the rest of this project and to future research through comparisons over the time span. The app enables the location on a map of the site and orientation of photographs taken by Strizic. Photographs are downloaded onto users’ devices from the online SLV Strizic picture catalogue. They appear in the app as transparent templates so that users can line up their own re-photograph with accuracy. They will be able to upload their resultant images to a server and they will be available to the Library as an archive enabling direct comparison with the Strizic holdings. It is anticipated that involvement and participation of the public will elevate the profile of the project and publicise the SLV collections and encourage their increased usage and popularity.

Illumination-invariant face recognition from a single image across extreme pose using a dual dimension AAM ensemble in the thermal infrared spectrum

Over the course of the last decade, infrared (IR) and particularly thermal IR imaging based face recognition has emerged as a promising complement to conventional, visible spectrum based approaches which continue to struggle when applied in practice. While inherently insensitive to visible spectrum illumination changes, IR data introduces specific challenges of its own, most notably sensitivity to factors which affect facial heat emission patterns, e.g. emotional state, ambient temperature, and alcohol intake. In addition, facial expression and pose changes are more difficult to correct in IR images because they are less rich in high frequency detail which is an important cue for fitting any deformable model. In this paper we describe a novel method which addresses these major challenges. Specifically, when comparing two thermal IR images of faces, we mutually normalize their poses and facial expressions by using an active appearance model (AAM) to generate synthetic images of the two faces with a neutral facial expression and in the same view (the average of the two input views). This is achieved by piecewise affine warping which follows AAM fitting. A major contribution of our work is the use of an AAM ensemble in which each AAM is specialized to a particular range of poses and a particular region of the thermal IR face space. Combined with the contributions from our previous work which addressed the problem of reliable AAM fitting in the thermal IR spectrum, and the development of a person-specific representation robust to transient changes in the pattern of facial temperature emissions, the proposed ensemble framework accurately matches faces across the full range of yaw from frontal to profile, even in the presence of scale variation (e.g. due to the varying distance of a subject from the camera). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on the largest public database of thermal IR images of faces and a newly acquired data set of thermal IR motion videos. Our approach achieved perfect recognition performance on both data sets, significantly outperforming the current state of the art methods even when they are trained with multiple images spanning a range of head views.

Infrared face recognition: a literature review

Automatic face recognition (AFR) is an area with immense practical potential which includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and it continues to be one of the most active research areas of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the state-of-the-art in AFR continues to improve, benefiting from advances in a range of different fields including image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics and physiology. However, systems based on visible spectrum images continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly decrease their accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR) imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.