From Light to Enlightenment

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From Light to Enlightenment
Edition Honours Class Big Images TU/e 2014
Kees van Overveld
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is looking?

• Exercise1.
• Describe in at most one sentence (lt20 words) the
  essence of what you will see next.
• I see

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is looking?

• Anwers
• I see the light of the beamer being reflected
  from the screen
• I see a distribution of light shades in the
  middle, brownish near the borders
• I see mainly smooth color distributions, granular
  in the middle and patches near the borders
• I see few light, rounded, symmetric 2D shapes in
  the middle and a rounded triangle in the lower
  left
• I see a roughly spherical shape in the middle and
  few flat, laying 3D shapes underneath
• I see a cup of cappuccino and a newspaper
• I see the cup being almost full and the newspaper
  not (yet) opened
• I see the careless beginning of a promising
  holiday in Italy

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is looking??

• Answers
• I see the light of the beamer being reflected
  from the screen
• I see a distribution of shades of grey
• I see mainly smooth distributions of grey,
  granular in places
• I see few dark lines, few swirls, blotches and
  scratches
• I see a presumably flat surface with some
  black shapes in it
• I see some traces of elementary particles in a
  bubble chamber
• I see a reaction between sub-atomic particles
  with various charges and masses, with lacking
  momentum
• I see the first ever empirical evidence of a
  neutrino

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Exercise 2.
• For the images of exercise 1, explain where they
  reside.
• Hint there are at least 10 different correct
  answers.

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Answers
• In the museum and in the bubble chamber at the
  instance of the nuclear reaction, respectively
• In former downtown lunchroom Peacock
  (Heuvelgalerie), where I took the photograph,
  and the Wikipedia archive, respectively
• At the hard disk of my computer
• In the beamer
• In the space between the beamer and the screen,
  or between the screen and your eyes
• In your eye
• In your retina
• In your brain
• In your mind
• In the sound waves in this room while we are
  talking about them

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• We are certain that an image may reside in our
  head (I dream therefore I see immediate access
  to our internal virtual subjective omnimax
  theatre)

All other answers apply only under certain
circumstances
So the only thing that holds with certainty for
each image, is that it has a mental, and
therefore subjective representation.
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Two problems
• We dont know how something looks
• in reality

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Two problems
• 2. We dont know what is to be seen in someone
  elses private theatre

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Answer Thanks to the miracle of equivalence and
the tendency of clustering, innate in our brains.
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Answer Thanks to the miracle of equivalence and
the tendency of clustering, innate in our brains.
being similar ?color
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Answer Thanks to the miracle of equivalence and
the tendency of clustering, innate in our brains.
being similar ?shape
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Answer Thanks to the miracle of equivalence and
the tendency of clustering, innate in our brains.
being similar ?size
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Preliminar conclusion A visible property
(color, shape, size, ) is the same thing
as a way of clustering or an equivalence
relation
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Q what is an equivalence relation? A a
statement about relating two elements in a set,
e.g. equally heavy, having the same father,
is connected to, where this relation
is Reflective M(a,a) Symmetric M(a,b) ?
M(b,a) Transitive M(a,b) M(b,c) ? M(a,c)
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
Example (same amount)






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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
So Equivalence relations bring forward classes
of elements, where all elements in a class are
mutually equivalent, so called Equivalence
classes. Equivalence classes are disjoint and
covering. An equivalence class is a convenient
way to define something abstract, such as THREE
or FOUR, being equivalence classes of equally
many.
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Apply to images
• Looks similar to is (almost) an equivalence
  relation.
• Looks similar w.r.t. color has equivalence
  classes RED, GREEN, etc
• Looks similar w.r.t. shape has equivalence
  classes ROUND, SQUARE, etc
• Looks similar w.r.t. size has equivalence
  classes LARGE, SMALL, etc

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From Light to Enlightenment
This is an Inevitable shortcoming of our brain
(and every measuring instrument), but at the same
time an evolutionary advantage, provided that
cluster boundaries have evolutionary meaningful
interpretations
Introduction what is an image?

• Apply to images
• Is similar to is (almost) an equivalence
  relation .

but not quite transitivity only holds in
approximation.
this is also true for textures, shapes, 3D
surfaces, objects and relalions and meaning
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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?

• Advantage of this trick (describing visible
  features in terms of equivalence relations)
• We dont need to bother about the essential
  meaning of red (just as we dont need to bother
  about the essential meaning of three).
• In stead, we can concentrate on
• interpretation of is similar to kinds of
  similarities
• identifying variants
• identifying invariants

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From Light to Enlightenment
Introduction what is an image?
There are many interpretations of is similar to
or makes me think of (jigSaw!)
Common to all Every describable feature of an
image is a lthere-thisgt pair,
Where here denotes a location and this is
some equivalence class.
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From Light to Enlightenment
Inleiding wat is een beeld?
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From Light to Enlightenment
Image features in layers
Proposal let us group this-s in groups Groups
have an ordering Properties in group n follow
(or build on) properties in group n-1 in
what sense follow?
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From Light to Enlightenment
1.Come and drink coffee with me
7.Meaning of the message
virtual communication III
2. Sequence of characters typed onto
keyboard
6. Letters on a screen
virtual communication II
3. Bits en bytes
5. Software
virtual communication I
4A. Electrical currents in wire
4B. Electronic detectionn
physical communication
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From Light to Enlightenment

• representations
• Difficult to define, but
• One representation can be converted into another
  oen
• Can be replaced by other representations where
  lower- and higher layers stay the same
  (variants!)
• Occur in a sequence of representation
  conversions, together fulfilling some purpose
  (where invariants, necessary for that purpose,
  stay the same)
• In images any representation can be written out
  as a series of here-this pairs

In the example Variants color hue,
reflectivity, thickness of the border,
Invariants color saturation, shape, meaning,
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From Light to Enlightenment

• representations in the context of communication
• 1st sequence of representations sender
• 2nd sequence of representations receiver
• Sender initiates process with initial
  communication-impuls or intention
• Receiver concludes the process with
  understanding of (and perhaps response to) the
  message
• Sender and receiver are connected with a physical
  link
• Virtual communications occur between any two
  intermediate representations

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From Light to Enlightenment
1.
7.
virtual communication
2. R
6. R decodes R
virtual communication
3. R encodes R
5. R
virtual communication
4A.
4B.
physical communication
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From Light to Enlightenment

• Which layers form a layered communication model
  for visual communication?
• Lower most light rays (physical communication)
• Top most layer intention and effect

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From Light to Enlightenment

• A 2-layer model is too naive
• We need additional layers to talk about
• Representations in terms of
• Colors, textures, shapes, surfaces, objects,
  relations and meaning
• Representation conversions such as
• Sending, reflecting and receiving light
• Sampling and discretisation
• Rendering and finding boundaries
• Interpreting 2D as projected 3D
• Understanding, recognizing and classifying
  objects and relations among them
• Therefore we propose 8 layers

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From Light to Enlightenment
meaning
relations
objects
surfaces
shapes
texture
Color distributions
Light rays
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From Light to Enlightenment

• Summary of essential concepts
• Clustering natural tendency of the brain
• Properties and values features that cause
  clusters to occur
• Here-this pairs an image as a collection of
  here-this pairs
• Equivalence way to deal with the
  intersubjectivity-problem
• Equivalence classes collection of
  indistinguishable values for a given property
• Variants and invariants what is lost, resp.
  preserved in representation conversion
• Coding and decoding takes place in sender and
  receiver, respectively
• Physical and virtual communication
• Layers with representations and representation
  conversions

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