In contemporary digital art computer technology plays an integral part not only in the creation of art pieces but also in their functioning as artworks. Such digital artworks have usually a performative or interactive character and therefore rely on an underlying working computer system. Since computer technology advances with such unrelenting pace, hardware and software modules eventually become obsolete. How to preserve digital art works in these circumstances from an art preservation standpoint is much debated. In this article we discuss issues in the preservation of digital art works using as a case study a 15 years old interactive art installation ‘15 seconds of fame’. The art installation could be maintained in a good working order first just by small changes, reacting mainly to new versions of operating systems. After more then ten years a complete rewrite of the code was necessary to move it to a new computing platform.
F.27 Contribution to preserving/protecting natural and cultural heritage
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537491651In this work we present the results of the Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC), a group benchmarking effort centered around the problem of person recognition from ear images captured in uncontrolled conditions. The goal of the challenge was to assess the performance of existing ear recognition techniques on a challenging largescale dataset and identify open problems that need to be addressed in the future. Five groups from three continents participated in the challenge and contributed six ear recognition techniques for the evaluation, while multiple baselines were made available for the challenge by the UERC organizers. A comprehensive analysis was conducted with all participating approaches addressing essential research questions pertaining to the sensitivity of the technology to head rotation, flipping, gallery size, large-scale recognition and others. The top performer of the UERC was found to ensure robust performance on a smaller part of the dataset (with 180 subjects) regardless of image characteristics, but still exhibited a significant performance drop when the entire dataset comprising 3,704 subjects was used for testing.
F.04 Increase of the technological level
COBISS.SI-ID: 11866452The analysis of weather requires data collected over long periods of time. Rainfall intensity is one of the basic weather measurements. Paper strip charts were used in the past, and in some parts of the world are used even today, to record rainfall intensity over a given period of time. Since most modern analysis takes place on computers, we need a way to digitise historical data to be able to process it. An existing automated algorithm was adapted and implemented in an interactive program to solve this task. The algorithm automatically processes images of rainfall charts and allows users to manually correct any errors, resulting in a very accurate reading. This work documents how the program works, the results it gives and the underlying problem itself. It also offers some commentary on computer-aided digitisation of other strip charts. The software is freely available on the web under an open-source license and serves as a base for continued growth and evolution by contributions from the community.
F.11 Development of a new service
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537589443When people talk to each other, eye contact is very important for a trustful and efficient communication. Video-conferencing systems were invented to enable such communication over large distances, recently using mostly Internet and personal computers. Despite low cost of such solutions, a broader acceptance and use of these communication means has not happened yet. One of the most important reasons for this situation is that it is almost impossible to establish eye contact between distant parties on the most common hardware configurations of such videoconferencing systems, where the camera for face capture is usually mounted above the computer monitor, where the face of the correspondent is observed. Different hardware and software solutions to this problem of missing eye contact have been proposed over the years. In this article we propose a simple solution that can improve the subjective feeling of eye contact, which is based on how people perceive 3D scenes displayed on slanted surfaces, and offer some experiments in support of the hypothesis.
F.02 Acquisition of new scientific knowledge
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537319619Members of the project group are leaders of the currently largest initiative for visual object tracking performance evaluation - the Visual object tracking challenge (VOT). The purpose of the initiative is, apart from objective tracker evaluation, construction of new datasets and performance evaluation protocols. In 2017 the initiative has organized the fifth VOT challenge and workshop within a major computer vision conference ICCV 2017. Over a hundred researchers have attended the challenge and the workshop. A major novelty in VOT2017 was analysis of realtime trackers, which are crucial component in modern autonomous robotic systems. This year, the University of Ljubljana recognized the work of the VOT initiative as one of ten most excellent research achievements of UL in 2017 (https://www.uni-lj.si/v_ospredju/2017120413202206/).
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537719235