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In the early 1960s, people throughout China fell in love with one of the country’s “new peasants,” the fictional character Li Shuangshuang. She was a vision of Li Zhun, a countryside author who was well known for his use of plain, direct language, full of local color, in portraying the changes in a newly socialist China. Li Zhun, an accomplished scenarist, soon wrote a film treatment for the story, and two years after the short story appeared in People’s Literature the fiery Li Shuangshuang and her backward husband Sun Xiwang came to life on the silver screen, portrayed by stars Zhang Ruifang and Zhong Xinghuo. The story was next adapted into a lianhuanhua (连环画 illustrated storybook, hereafter, storybook), so children and even adults who did not have easy access to either the film or the short story could be exposed to its message. Li Shuangshuang was a creative, energetic woman who embodied the ideals of a new peasant, combining an innate understanding of labor and the land with the drive for equality and the achievement of socialist ideals. She was the perfect character in which to combine the modern ideals of socialism with traditional folk culture, and grappling with the challenges of interpreting her story leads to reading strategies with which to approach Maoist culture in the first 17 years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Ironically, scholars have had little to say about Mac Flecknoe, the Restoration's great nightmare vision of cultural anarchy, despite the fact that John Dryden, poet laureate, historiographer royal, and "the father of English criticism," has long stood as the central figure for the formation of a literary culture in late seventeenth-century England.' One of Dryden's most virulent satires, Mac Flecknoe defies the very critical constructions of eighteenth-century decorum and neoclassical balance and proportion which he himself championed, and as a result it is often bypassed as an anomaly by prominent studies of his career.2 At the same time, the obtrusiveness and accessibility of the poem's topical political and theatrical references have led literary historians to mine Mac Flecknoe for the scholarly equivalent of "local color," dismembering it as needed and utterly divorcing the poem's political and literary content from its poetic structure. Even the best of critics have tended to read it one topical reference at a time, and often only in passing;3 more often it is represented as the petty manifestation of personal and professional resentment or the "historically significant"

Image recoloring is the process of modification and adjustment of color appearance in images. Existing methods address the recoloring of a single image. We propose a method for recoloring stereoscopic images. Naively recoloring each image independently will require a pair of strokes in the source stereoscopic image pair. However, it is difficult to require consistent strokes on both the left and right views. We show how to extend a single image recoloring to work on stereoscopic images. Our method requires only a few user strokes on the left view and automatically transfers the corresponding strokes to the right view. Then a nonlocal color linear model optimization assumption is designed. Our nonlocal color linear model inherits the advantages of global and local color propagation methods. Our approach can propagate color cues in a global manner which can propagate color relatively far from the provided color constraints, while it provides the user with good local control. The experimental results show that the recolorized image pair is geometrically consistent with the original one.

Swooning heroines, trembling villains bent on revenge, dramatic confrontations in which the forces of evil threaten the innocent and the virtuous-these are some of the elements common to the nineteenthcentury Italian ballets described in Selma Jeanne Cohen's 1964 article "Virtue (almost) Triumphant," a survey of nearly 300 ballet libretti housed in the Music Division of The New York Public Library.' Cohen's study of these primary sources provides illuminating glimpses into a repertoire largely unfamiliar to today's balletgoing audience. Her article stresses the heavy preponderance of melodramas in a repertoire also sprinkled with tragedies, pastoral divertissements, and a few comedies. Plot summaries of works such as Sara, o sia II Bardo del Torrente and Colombo, ossia La Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo illustrate the conventions of the Italian melodrama: evening-length productions, often stretching to five acts; narratives set in exotic locations or the distant past with a multitude of costumed "extras" on stage to provide local color; the alternation of dancing and pantomime passages (much like aria and recitative in opera); an emphasis on elaborate staging and the popularity of spectacular scenic effects (floods, fires, even volcanic eruptions); and plots brimming with reversals of for

We present a method to locate an "object" in a color image, or more precisely, to select a set of likely locations for the object. The model is assumed to be of known color distribution, which permits the use color-space processing. A new method is presented, which exploits more information than the previous backprojection algorithm of Swain and Ballard (1990) at a competitive complexity. Precisely, the new algorithm is based on matching local histograms with the model, instead of directly replacing pixels with a confidence that they belong to the object. We prove that a simple version of this algorithm degenerates into backprojection in the worst case. In addition, we show how to estimate the scale of the model. Results are shown on pictures digitized from the famous "Where is Waldo" books. Issues concerning the optimal choice of a color space and its quantization are carefully considered and studied in this application. We also propose to use co-occurrence histograms to deal with cases where important color variations can be expected. >

Purpose Abnormalities of blood vessel anatomy, morphology, and ratio can serve as important diagnostic markers for retinal diseases such as AMD or diabetic retinopathy. Large cohort studies demand automated and quantitative image analysis of vascular abnormalities. Therefore, we developed an analytical software tool to enable automated standardized classification of blood vessels supporting clinical reading. Methods A dataset of 61 images was collected from a total of 33 women and 8 men with a median age of 38 years. The pupils were not dilated, and images were taken after dark adaption. In contrast to current methods in which classification is based on vessel profile intensity averages, and similar to human vision, local color contrast was chosen as a discriminator to allow artery vein discrimination and arterial-venous ratio (AVR) calculation without vessel tracking. Results With 83% ± 1 standard error of the mean for our dataset, we achieved best classification for weighted lightness information from a combination of the red, green, and blue channels. Tested on an independent dataset, our method reached 89% correct classification, which, when benchmarked against conventional ophthalmologic classification, shows significantly improved classification scores. Conclusions Our study demonstrates that vessel classification based on local color contrast can cope with inter- or intraimage lightness variability and allows consistent AVR calculation. We offer an open-source implementation of this method upon request, which can be integrated into existing tool sets and applied to general diagnostic exams.

The Taichung Wanchun Gong Mazu Temple is called i§Lanxing Mazui¨ or i§Taichung Mazu, i¨ the temple being one of the earliest Mazu temples in the Taichung area. This research is a direct result of a collaborated project entitled i§The Compilation of Taichung Wanchun Gongi¦s Gazetteer and Its Website Constructioni¨ between the templei¦s Management Committee and the Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology (CTUST) in 2009. This work is motivated by the need for an ancient Mazu temple with local color, to cope with the advent of the information era by using academic/cultural resources for digitizing archiving and networking so that it can offer better religious/cultural services in todayi¦s increasingly digital times.

In this paper, we propose a method for human segmentation in videos, extending the recent locally competing 1SVM model. There are only local color distributions to be made use of in the model. To generate a consistent segmentation from complex environments, first, we assume we obtain a bounding box around human by using the human detector. Then we incorporate shape prior information inside the bounding box, which biases the segmentation towards typical human shapes. Finally, we show a substantial improvement over C-1SVM method from our experiment.

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.

In this work we present an automatic local color transfer method based on semantic image annotation. With this annotation, images are segmented into homogeneous regions, assigned to seven different classes (vegetation, snow, water, ground, street, and sand). Our method permits to automatically transfer the color distribution from regions of the source and target images annotated with the same class (for example the class "sky"). The amount of color transfer can be controlled by tuning a single parameter. Experimental results will show that our local color transfer is usually more visually pleasant than a global approach. © 2011 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

In Moby Dick, Melville describes Queequeg as "a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map", he says (chapter 12). "True places never are." Topographies of arrival and departure are not limited solely to the real in literature. While a cartographer reads the surface of the earth to map its arrangement and relations, the preservationist writer might describe a topography whose features are both reassuringly real and phantasmagorically shifting. Topography in literature allows readers a better understanding of the physical traits that make up a textual space and the more essential qualities that give space meaning.In this paper, I want to suggest that Sarah Orne Jewett takes a preservationist stance toward changes in American life, changes that are reflected in the topographical landscape - both real and imagined - of her short story, A White Heron} Much as the wildernessconservation advocates of the late 19th century sought to maintain historically sedimented sites, Jewett captures and protects the sacred spaces of nature through her fiction. A White Heron does not merely attempt to preserve a forgotten or disintegrating terrain. In fact, Jewett posits an environmentalism that protects the space of the imagination - building a kind of metaphorical conservation park for places that never quite existed. My discussion will move beyond a Regionalist interpretation (which has historically dominated Jewett criticism) and argue for a more nuanced, "eeo-eritieal" look at the production of space in A White Heron. I'd like to redirect the reader's attention to several environmental themes in the story: natural preservation, description of place, the treatment (and anthropomorphism) of animals in the story, the figure of the hunter as outside the private space of Nature, Sylvia's ascent up the tree - and suggest that these locodescriptive spaces hover between the fictive and the real. If you accept this invitation, you may be more likely to view Regionalism' s convincing epistemology as due, in part, to the production of regions as spaces of fantasy.A number of critics have successfully read Jewett's short story as a rite of passage, as a feminist stance against patriarchy, as an appeal for country values or an archetype of "local color" fiction with nostalgic or ambivalent reactions to historical transition. Even some of the most valuable of this work, however, seems to me to ignore the preservationist protocols of environmental theory that are clearly present in Jewett's story. Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse, for example, run the risk of fencing in regionalism when they suggest, in Writing out of Place, "the etymology of the word 'region' does not suggest any connection to 'natural' or geographical boundaries [...] the territory of the realm is the rear (Fetterley and Pryse 2005: 5). Ecocriticism has a special, if delicate, purchase on space as a problem in literature: eco-critics share with regionalists the burden of identifying the environment as a meaningful trope in texts, one that offers new contributions to a reader's understanding of spatial production. While regionalist literature has often given voice to the dislocated, the uprooted, and the wandering, eco-critical literature encompasses nonhuman as well as human contexts and considerations. Human accountability for the environment becomes part of the text's ethical orientation: readers are asked to consider what is at stake for the climate, not just what is at stake for the characters (Love 2003: 166).These charged references to space and environment, increasingly posited in contemporary literary discourse, bring us to A White Heron (1886). Set in turn-of-the-century coastal Maine, Jewett's story holds up for inspection local patterns of life that have vanished. The story centers on nine -year-old Sylvia, who is searching one night for her stray milk cow in the woods of New England. She is startled by the sudden appearance of a young man with a gun, who proclaims that he is an ornithologist and has come to this rural region to hunt and stuff birds for pleasure. …

Success in visually searching for a small object or target in a natural scene depends on many factors, including the spatial structure of the scene and the pattern of observers' eye movements. The aim of this study was to determine to what extent local color properties of natural scenes can account for target-detection performance. A computercontrolled high-resolution color monitor was used to present images of natural scenes containing a small, randomly located, shaded gray sphere, which served as the target. Observers' gaze position was simultaneously monitored with an infrared video eye-tracker. About 60% of the adjusted variance in observers' detection performance was accounted for by local color properties, namely, lightness and the red-green and blue-yellow components of chroma. A similar level of variance was accounted for by observers' fixations. These results suggest that local color can be as influential as gaze position in determining observers' search performance in natural scenes. © 2012 Optical Society of America.

The current paper proposes a novel color correction approach based on a probabilistic segmentation framework by using 3D Gaussian Mixture Models. Regions are used to compute local color correction functions, which are then combined to obtain the final corrected image. The proposed approach is evaluated using both a recently published metric and two large data sets composed of seventy images. The evaluation is performed by comparing our algorithm with eight well known color correction algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is the highest scoring color correction method. Also, the proposed single step 3D color space probabilistic segmentation reduces processing time over similar approaches.

The braided rug with its rings and the herb pennyroyal are two symbolic materials associated with mysterious powers and secrecy in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.[1] Both rug and pennyroyal are identified with Almira Todd, the book's dominating figure who invokes our compassion despite her sibylline presence. Both materials are inextricably a part of the cultural and folk histories of northern New England and Jewett seems to have utilized them for structural and spiritual value. They serve as powerful intangible forces in her Dunnet Landing community as they are woven into the story with great skill and relied on by the characters and by the reader in ways too subtle to ignore.A modest body of critical discussion favors and defends Pointed Firs, and so newer readings of it can consider Jewett's references to cultural materials and practice and what meanings these have in northern New England. Mrs. Todd has somewhat escaped notice as a character whose commanding appearance and manner in fact do much to obscure a figure of pathos. The black and gray rings of her braided rug, together with her secret garden of pennyroyal, a widely acknowledged "female herb," are elements reaffirming her being described as a person of great sadness (49). Her rug, in the middle of which she stands when she first speaks freely about "the other man" she loved, dictates the structure of the novel's action and relationships; at the center of the action is the pennyroyal episode on Green Island. Of the many stories Mrs. Todd either tells the narrator or serves as the catalyst for the narrator to hear, not even the story of Joanna on Shell-heap Island is as pathetic as her own, an experience of triple loss that includes the book's deepest secret. A reading of Pointed Firs emphasizing the braided rug and the herb as significant cultural coordinates is timely.Elizabeth Ammons argues that both Mrs. Todd and the novel exemplify a webbed and nuclear construct, moving "out from one base to a given point and back again, out to another point, and back...like arteries on a spider's web" (85). Perhaps Ammons's structural interpretation is irrefutable; however, her argumental basis for a nuclear design shifts by the end of her essay to language describing the novel structurally as concentric and centrifugal, its "emotional energy...like rings spreading out when a stone is dropped in a pool" (91). Taken literally, this lacks the configuration of a spider's web. Mrs. Todd standing in the middle of her rug is more analogous to the novel's design; she easily dictates a radiation construct, and as Ammons would know, the pennyroyal chapter (X) is further analogous to her central position and dominating emotional energy. I prefer to revise Ammons's interpretive strategy of nuclear centrifugality in a spider web, since the web is here and there as irregular as it is perfectly marvelous, in favor of viewing the structure and meaning of action in Pointed Firs as a series of radiating cores linked by braiding as one would connect the braids in a rug. This would amplify the nuclear radiating thesis by drawing on specific details about braided rugs and the use of herbs in New England folk practice. Furthermore, this point of view can explain how the narrator and the reader come to feel sorry for Mrs. Todd. Jewett refers to these materials casually. Yet the questions their functions imply she coyly, and perhaps respectfully for the sake of women's intimate affairs and because she is also an artist, leaves unexplained, treating rug and herb in a profoundly subtle manner. Jewett intends these materials to be representational in this story of local color realism. Not the rug but the pennyroyal is heavily laden with sexual meaning. Each material has been relegated critically to secondary importance (except for Ammons's essay on Jewett's "Female Geography") and this is understandable because their symbolic roles in the novel are immersed in the intangibles of cultural practice and meaning. …

Five experiments reexamined color aftereffects contingent on the semantic properties of text (Allan, Siegel, Collins, & MacQueen, 1989). The influence of different assessment techniques and the effect of eye movements and overlapping contour information on the induction of color aftereffects by word and nonword letter strings were determined. Experiment 1 showed that no aftereffect was found when a traditional method of assessing color aftereffects was used. Experiments 2 and 4 demonstrated color aftereffects forboth words and nonwords, but only when subjects fixated the same locus during induction and testing and only when assessed with the technique described by Allan et al. (1989). If, however, eye movements were made during induction, no color aftereffect was obtained (Experiment 3). Induction to nontext patterns with properties similar to those of text but with fewer overlapping contours resulted in a strong color aftereffect (Experiment 5). These results suggest that the color aftereffect contingent on text is very weak and is not dependent on semantic factors, but that it is a product of induction to local color and orientation information.

Campbell, Donna. "Edith Wharton and the 'Authoresses': The Critique of Local Color in Wharton's Early Fiction." Studies in American Fiction 22 (Fall 1994): 169-183.

This paper proposes a novel face descriptor based on color information, i.e., so-called local color vector binary patterns (LCVBPs), for face recognition (FR). The proposed LCVBP consists of two discriminative patterns: color norm patterns and color angular patterns. In particular, we have designed a method for extracting color angular patterns, which enables to encode the discriminating texture patterns derived from spatial interactions among different spectral-band images. In order to perform FR tasks, the proposed LCVBP feature is generated by combining multiple features extracted from both color norm patterns and color angular patterns. Extensive and comparative experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed LCVBP feature on five public databases. Experimental results show that the proposed LCVBP feature is able to yield excellent FR performance for challenging face images. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed LCVBP feature has successfully been tested by comparing other state-of-the-art face descriptors.

The current paper proposes a new parametric local color correction technique. Initially, several color transfer functions are computed from the output of the mean shift color segmentation algorithm. Secondly, color influence maps are calculated. Finally, the contribution of every color transfer function is merged using the weights from the color influence maps. The proposed approach is compared with both global and local color correction approaches. Results show that our method outperforms the technique ranked first in a recent performance evaluation on this topic. Moreover, the proposed approach is computed in about one tenth of the time.

Classifying the unknown image into the correct related class is the aim of the object class recognition systems. Two main points should be kept in mind to implement a class recognition system. Which descriptors that have a higher discriminative power that needs to be extracted from the images? Which classifier can classify these descriptors successfully? The most famous image descriptor is the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Although, SIFT has a high performance, it is partially an illumination invariant. Adding local color information to SIFT descriptors are then suggested to increase the illumination invariant, these descriptors can be called color SIFT descriptors. In this paper, different color SIFT descriptors were implemented to evaluate their performance in the object class recognition systems. This is due to the fact that some descriptors may have a good performance in one class and bad performance in another class at the same time. All possible combinations of these descriptors were used. Some combinations of color SIFT descriptors achieved remarkable classification accuracy. Non linear χ2-kernel support vector machine is used as a learning classifier and bag-of-features representation is used to represent the image features in this paper.

We present two novel contributions to the problem of region classification in scenery/landscape images. The first is a model that incorporates local cues with global layout cues, following the statistical characteristics recently suggested in [1]. The observation that background regions in scenery images tend to horizontally span the image allows us to represent the contextual dependencies between background region labels with a simple graphical model, on which exact inference is possible. While background is traditionally classified using only local color and textural features, we show that using new layout cues significantly improves background region classification. Our second contribution addresses the problem of correct results being considered as errors in cases where the ground truth provides the structural class of a land region (e.g., mountain), while the classifier provides its coverage class (e.g., grass), or vice versa. We suggest an alternative labeling method that, while trained using ground truth that describes each region with one label, assigns both a structural and a coverage label for each land region in the validation set. By suggesting multiple labels, each describing a different aspect of the region, the method provides more information than that available in the ground truth.

Despite the recent developments in spatiotemporal local features for action recognition in video sequences, local color information has so far been ignored. However, color has been proved an important element to the success of automated recognition of objects and scenes. In this paper we extend the space-time interest point descriptor STIP to take into account the color information on the features' neighborhood. We compare the performance of our color-aware version of STIP (which we have called HueSTIP) with the original one.

Content-Based Video Retrieval (CBVR) is a research area that has drawn a good deal of attention in recent years. The ability to retrieve videos similar to a given one in terms of implicit features (mainly pictorial features) and/or explicit characteristics (eg. semantic context) are the cornerstones of this growing interest. In this paper we present the results obtained within the project vManager, a CBVR system based on local color and motion signatures, our own video representation and different metrics of similarity among videos. The results for real videos point to promising advances, not only as regards the effectiveness of the system, but also in terms of its efficiency.

Initiatives such as the Google Print Library Project and the Million Book Project have already archived more than ten million books in digital format, and within the next decade the majority of world’s books will be online. Although most of the data will naturally be text, there will also be tens of millions of pages of images, many in color. While there is an active research community pursuing data mining of text from historical manuscripts, there has been very little work that exploits the rich color information which is often present. In this work we introduce a simple color measure which both addresses and exploits typical features of historical manuscripts. To enable the efficient mining of massive archives, we propose a tight lower bound to the measure. Beyond the fast similarity search, we show how this lower bound allows us to build several higher-level data mining tools, including motif discovery and link analyses. We demonstrate our ideas in several data mining tasks on manuscripts dating back to the fifteenth century.

Color constancy is the ability to recognize colors of objects invariant to the color of the light source. Systems for object detection or recognition in images use machine learning based on image descriptors to distinguish object and scene categories. However, there can be large variations in viewing and lighting conditions for real-world scenes, complicating the characteristics of images and consequently the image category recognition task. To reduce the effect of such variations, either color constancy algorithms or illumination-invariant color descriptors could be used. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of straightforward color constancy methods in practice, with respect to their utilization in a standard object classification problem, and also investigate their effects using local versions of these algorithms. These methods are then compared with color invariant descriptors. In a novel contribution, we ascertain that a combination of local color constancy methods and color invariant descriptors improve the performance of object recognition by as much as more than 10 percent, a significant improvement.

In this paper we present a method for the retrieval of images in terms of perceptual similarity. Local color information is added to the shape context descriptor in order to obtain an object description integrating both shape and color as visual cues. We use a color naming algorithm in order to represent the color information from a perceptual point of view. The proposed method has been tested in two different applications, an object retrieval scenario based on color sketch queries and a color trademark retrieval problem. Experimental results show that the addition of the color information significantly outperforms the sole use of the shape context descriptor.

Hierarchical Error Diffusion (HED) developed in [14] yields high-quality color halftone by explicitly designing three critical factors: dot overlapping, positioning, and coloring. However, HED requires more error memory buffer than the conventional error diffusion algorithms since the pixel error is diffused in dot-color domain, instead of colorant domain. This can potentially be an issue for certain low-cost hardware implementation. This paper develops a memory-efficient HED algorithm (MEHED). To achieve this goal, the pixel error in dot-color domain is converted backward and diffused to future pixels in input colorant domain, say, CMYK for print applications. Since the error-augmented pixel value is no longer bounded within the range [0, 1.0], the dot overlapping control algorithm developed in [14] needs to be generalized to coherently handle the pixel density of outside the normal range. The key is to carefully split the modified pixel density into three parts: negative, regular, and surplus densities. The determination of regular and surplus densities needs to be dependent on the density of K channel, in order to maintain local color and avoid halftone texture artifact. The resulting dot-color densities are serves as the input to hierarchical thresholding and coloring steps to generate final halftone output. Experimental results demonstrate that MEHED achieves similar image quality compared to HED.

The paper presents a new interactive local color transformation method base on GrowCut image segmentation algorithm. The method improves Maslennikova et al's CIM based color transformation algorithm by using Coupled Map Lattices (CML). An intuitive and easy user interface is also supported. User just needs to draft some trails both in reference and target image to make the local color matched. The color transformation method represents some good characteristics auto-repair and segmentation with the usage of GrowCut.

There are about 8% of men and 0.8% of women suffering from colorblindness. These viewers have difficulty in discriminating several colors, and thus many colorful images and videos that have high qualities for normal viewers may not be readily perceptible for them. In this paper, we propose an efficient re-coloring approach which can modify the colors of images and videos to enhance their perceptibility for colorblind users. Given an image, the re-coloring is accomplished by two color rotation steps in CIELAB color space. We first perform a local color rotation such that information of b* axis can be enhanced, and then adopt a global color rotation to refine the results. We will show that this method is simple yet effective, and it is able to outperform the traditional re-coloring algorithms in both performance and computational efficiency. We apply the method to process video frames and adopt several strategies to further reduce computational cost to realize real-time video re-coloring. We also explore the structure information of video data to avoid the color inconsistency problem. Specifically, we enforce the color mapping function to be identical in each shot and vary smoothly in adjacent shots. We conduct experiments on real-world images and videos with diverse content, and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

An combined trademark image retrieval method based on shape and the key local color features is proposed. First , retrieve images with a wavelet modulus maxima algorithm based on the self-adaptive threshold using the shape features. Second, retrieve using the key local color features which contained the colors’ statistic and local distributing characteristics. At last, set a weight considering the similarity degree of the shape and color. The experimental results indicated that this algorithm can retrieve similar trademark images fast and efficiently, and improve the recall ratio and precision ratio.

In this paper, we use the formalism of Clifford algebras to extend the so-called Monogenic Signal to color images. This extension consists in a function with values in the Clifford algebra ?5,0 that encodes color as well as geometric structure information. Using geometric calculus, such a mathematical object can be used to extend classical concepts of signal processing (filtering, Fourier Transform...) to color images in a consistent manner. Regarding this paper, a local color phase is introduced, which generalizes the one for grayscale image. As an example of application, we provide a new method for color segmentation. Based on our phase definition and the multiscale aspect of the Color Monogenic Signal, we provide a metric approach using differential geometry which reveals relevant on the Berkeley Image Dataset.

The so-called spatial turn of the humanities has led to an increasing interest in mapmaking. Looking at various trends in map-making the paper evaluates possible links and cooperation between cartography and literary studies. Differentiating between two central questions - which features of literature may be considered as spatial and in what way literature as a social practice could become spatially relevant – the paper argues that maps of literature should be based on specific features that constitute a literary text as opposed to other forms of art and discourse. Claiming that maps of literature should provide more than a visualisation of structure or an illustration of certain forms or content, the paper pleads for a general understanding about aims, terminology and standards of literary geography. As this requires a theory of space in literary texts, the paper distinguishes between various levels of spatiality in texts and different forms of constructing narrative space, suggesting outlines for future map-making of literary phenomena. Future endeavours of literary cartography and geography should refiect that in literature there is no space as such. Literary space is both sequential and discontinuous.

A reading of Western medieval literary texts, suggests that water as motif, theme, symbol, or element of local color appears occasionally but not often with real force, as a structuring element. Four well-known medieval works, the eleventh-century Old English epic Beowulf , the twelfth century French romance Yvain , the fourteenth-century Middle English allegory Pearl , and Chaucers Millers Tale , a fabliau written in the late 1300s come to mind not only because they contain aqueous imagery, references, and motifs but because water appears to be central to the literary and thematic design of these works vis a vis their respective genres. This chapter sheds light on the role that water plays at, and in, this intersection of genre, place, and culture. The fourteenth century allegory Pearl presents study of human strength and limitations as explored through the motif of water. The Millers Tale employs water imagery as a means of demarcation. Keywords: Beowulf ; fabliau; Millers Tale ; Pearl ; water imagery; Yvain

By the time of the first extant letter written after the Christmas and New Year period, penned on 4 January 1937, the POUM had been removed from the Catalan government coalition, reflecting the uncertain fate of revolutionary aspirations in the winter of 1936–1937. Lois’ and Charles’ involvement with POUM politics, however, deepened, with Charles taking over the English-language propaganda department of the POUM. In February 1937 Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s wife, began to work as Charles’ secretary, as her writer-husband fought at the front.

Because of the large number of young men who had either been killed in the Civil War, left the region seeking a new beginning in the West, or moved to more prosperous metropolitan centers on the East coast, rural life in 19th century New England was primarily matriarchal or female-centered. As evidenced in the works of the “local color” writers—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—the women who remained were, for the most part, poor, elderly, and impoverished, living in a land where, for them, scarcity was the norm. They were what has come to be known as the “rural poor.” Nonetheless, even though most of the pleasures in life were beyond their reach, these New England women took great pride in what little they had and put great stock in a particular dress, bonnet, or tea service that enabled them to maintain a sense of dignity and decorum in the face of great adversity. Continuing to dress well, serving an elegant tea, wearing the proper bonnet, allowed them to live their lives with their heads held high and to carry on as the strong, indomitable women they were.

I n the traditional concert repertoire, works with a strong Hungarian-Gypsy flavor have enjoyed a popularity almost unequalled by any other genre. Pieces such as Brahms' Hungarian Dances and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies remain audience favorites because their distinctive rhythm, drive, and tunefulness provide familiarity and accessibility on one hand, and a spicy exoticism on the other. The characteristic musical gestures used in works such as these, far from being unconnected examples of local color, form a unified 214 and coherent dialect running parallel to the normal musical lingua franca of the nineteenth century. Since Haydn's time, the gestures of this dialect came increasingly to be used and understood outside the Viennese orbit where their appearance in concert music originated. The Style hongrois, as this style has been called, was effective at different levels of intensity. An inflection or two might add a slight Hungarian tint to an otherwise non-exotic passage, or the gestures could appear in greater concentration to form a contrasting section in a larger work. Of course, the Style hongrois could also form an entire musical discourse, as in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies or Schubert's Divertissement a l'hongroise. The very ubiquity of this style, in its various concentrations, in nineteenth-century repertoire is proof of the appeal it held for audiences of the time. This appeal depended on cultural associations as much as on purely musical ones. What the Gypsies and their music represented to the Romantic sensibility is encapsulated by Liszt's performance instruction at the beginning of the seventh Hungarian Rhapsody, which reads: "To be played in the Gypsy style, defiant, and yet melancholy." To the popular imagination, the Gypsy symbolized freedom, nonconformity, and independence from the constricting mores of society. Liszt was not only a staunch defender of the Gypsies' culture, he was

The article analyzes the depiction of Brooklyn as an urban region in a number of recent American novels, including Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn and Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos. It argues that Brooklyn is frequently defined in opposition to Manhattan: the former being viewed as the epitome of American ideals of community-in-diversity, the latter as homogenizing, globalizing and obsessed with newness. In a time when regions and communities are frequently regarded as under threat from, amongst other things, globalization and terrorism, it is interesting to examine whether the ideals of diversity and community associated with Brooklyn are based on nostalgic, mythic notions of land and family or are in fact based on superficial signifiers of diversity and a range of consumer choices. The article goes on to argue that the complex interactions between the regional and the global in these novels can be seen as analogous to processes of reading regional texts themselves.

Taking With Hui'an women living in the south China's Fujian Province as an example, the thesis analysis the constitution of Hui'an woman's finery. Through the deeply scratch of color theory, we analyse the physiological reason which cause color in eyes. We study the mental acts created by physiological reasoning, color collocation and symbolic meaning. The thesis brings up a viewpoint that the native color element enhances the art infectivity when we are creating animation. By strengthening the local color's colored activity, making the animation have a special effect visual reception, I make an animation named which tells a story about diligent and sapiential Hui'an woman. The article illustrate how I use local color to build up the characters; control the tempo of animation; sublime the theme of story, make a better effect of local color to manifest Hui'an women's spirit of laborious, brave and septennial. The innovative research of this thesis might be helpful to the animator when they are plant to create a cartoon with local characteristic and color style.

Since visible human visualization using cryosection images is still a challenge for its own difficulties such as color inhomogeneity between adjacent images, most visible human visualizations use pseudo color. In this paper, we propose a method to make cross-section image along human surface homogeneous, and provide a method to reconstruct and visualize 3D visible human with an approximate and reasonable real surface color. The visualization method consists of three components, which are preprocessing (registering image series, obtaining color checkers' color and removing background), color correction (global color correction with the help of the color checker and local color correction by using adjacent image) and 3D visualization with color (smoothing model and generating color). The experiment on head data of Chinese Visible Human shows that our method is successful for the 3D reconstruction and color visualization.

In this paper, we address the issue of transducing the object cutout model from an example image to novel image instances. We observe that although object and background are very likely to contain similar colors in natural images, it is much less probable that they share similar color configurations. Motivated by this observation, we propose a local color pattern model to characterize the color configuration in a robust way. Additionally, we propose an edge profile model to modulate the contrast of the image, which enhances edges along object boundaries and attenuates edges inside object or background. The local color pattern model and edge model are integrated in a graph-cut framework. Higher accuracy and improved robustness of the proposed method are demonstrated through experimental comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this paper we present a conceptual framework for various emotion image spaces based on web design. In order to assist novices with color set as senior designers, we build a web-based agent system for novices. We use questionnaire to get sample data and use multiple regression analysis to predict the population of various emotion image spaces. The system can tell designers that whether the image-words match various colors or not. It provides designer suggestions of color set and analyzes. To conclude, the concept of this research can apply to all design domains. We build the emotion image database fits any questionnaire and the color set of this web-based agent system can stand for local color and culture.

A continuing question in the object recognition literature is whether surface properties play a role in visual representation and recognition. Here, we examined the use of color as a cue in facial gender recognition by applying a version of reverse correlation to face categorization in CIE L∗a∗b∗ color space. We found that observers exploited color information to classify ambiguous signals embedded in chromatic noise. The method also allowed us to identify the specific spatial locations and the components of color used by observers. Although the color patterns found with human observers did not accurately mirror objective natural color differences, they suggest sensitivity to the contrast between the main features and the rest of the face. Overall, the results provide evidence that observers encode and can use the local color properties of faces, in particular, in tasks in which color provides diagnostic information and the availability of other cues is reduced.

Most previous writings on musical exoticism reflect the unspoken assumption that a work is perceived by the listener as exotic only if it incorporates distinctively foreign or otherwise highly unusual elements of musical style. This “Exotic Style Only” Paradigm often proves revelatory, especially for purely instrumental works. In operas and other musicodramatic works set in exotic locales, by contrast, music is heard within a narrative “frame” that shapes the listener's response. Yet the existing literature on “the exotic in music” tends to restrict its attention to those few scenes or passages (in such works) that “sound non-Western.” It also tends to leave unmentioned the many Baroque-era operas and dramatic oratorios that focus on despicable Eastern tyrants. The present article proposes an “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm to help make sense of a variety of exotic portrayals that are strikingly diverse in message and means: 1) Les Indes galantes (Rameau's application of standard musico-rhetorical devices to manipulative and anti-colonialist speeches by the Peruvian leader Huascar); 2) Belshazzar (Handel's vivid musical setting of the passage in which the cruel, cowardly Eastern despot seeks oblivion in drink); 3) Bizet's Carmen (the Card Scene, which is notably free of Hispanic or other local color yet, through rigidly recurring devices in voice and orchestra, indelibly limns Carmen's Gypsy fatalism); and 4) three prominent dramatic moments, two of them rarely discussed, in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. In each case, the full range of artistic components—including musical devices that lie within or outside the traditional exotic vocabulary—enriches our understanding of how diversely, powerfully, sometimes disturbingly the exoticizing process can function in genres that combine music with dramatic representation.

To write about the work of our colleagues and our own is never an easy task, not only because of the close involvement with the subject matter, but also because, in characterizing someone else's writings, there is always the risk of misunderstandings, distortions, omissions, and other injustices. What follows is the personal view of someone who has been conducting indigenous studies since the 1960s, and has, therefore, her own understanding of the field. My reading of ethnological production in Brazil will probably differ from that of my Brazilian colleagues, and will certainly be different from that of foreign ethnologists. But, being totally immersed in the ethnological community of the country, I could never pretend to pose as an impartial observer. The reason I propose this exercise is twofold; one is to present to a nonBrazilian audience some of the features of ethnographic work done in Brazil; the other is to address the question of the social responsibility of ethnographers in their actions and writings regarding the peoples they study. It is not my intention to do a survey of the literature on Brazilian Indians, this has been competently done by several people, among them Baldus (1954, 1968), his successor Hartmann (1984), and Melatti (1982, 1984). Nor is it to exhaust the field of personal styles and biographies of specific anthropologists, even if I have to focus on one or two major figures in the field. What I want to do is emphasize some aspects of Brazilian ethnography that give it specificity and identity. Perhaps much of what is said here is sheer wishful thinking or, at times, also an expression of frustration and dissatisfaction. Be that as it may, ethnology should be practiced with a dose of passion and that, I feel, is not lacking in Brazil. Perhaps our northern readers will have to make a certain mental effort to catch the implied rather than explicit tone of our discourse. Being outspoken is not one of the most salient features of Brazilianness. But such an effort can be, I hope, an interesting ethnographic experience of its own, a sort of "fusion of horizons" without falling into the trap of confusion of premises. Some of the local color will necessarily be lost in the translation into the English mode of thinking, but the effort of communicating with a foreign audience will perhaps force me to make more explicit certain thoughts that might otherwise never come out of the narrow space between the lines.

In the present study, we examine the relation between neon color spreading (Redies & Spillmann, 1981) and illusory contours. In Experiment 1, the effects of misalignment between the line elements on the illusory contours in the Ehrenstein figure and in the Redies-Spillmann figure were examined. The remarkable overlap of the two curves for the likelihood of perceiving illusory contours in the Ehrenstein figure and in the Redies-Spillmann figure suggests that the illusory contours surrounding brightness enhancement (Ehrenstein, 1941) and those surrounding neon color spreading are caused by the same mechanism. We further examined both the effects of the interposed grids seen either in front of or behind the figures (Experiment 2) and the effects of misalignment (Experiment 3) on the illusory contours and range of color spreading, and found a high correlation between the appearance/disappearance of illusory contours and global/local color spreading. In Experiment 4, we added new lines to induce illusory contours to the line elements inducing local color spreading. We found that global color spreading was seen to cover the area surrounded by the illusory contours. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that there is an interaction between illusory contours and local color spreading.

Chingiz Aitmatov has long been a powerful figure in Soviet literature, but few critics in the west or the Soviet Union have treated him as a serious writer. Many of the reasons why Aitmatov's reputation is not commensurate with his achievement are clear enough; the few westerners who have bothered with Aitmatov tend to agree that he offers "a somewhat new mix from the old patterns of Soviet literature with an admixture of Central Asian lore, but the game he is playing is as old as socialist realism itself." ' Critics in the Soviet Union, however much they may praise him, still generally relegate Aitmatov to the ranks of the national writers and leave him outside of Russian literature. Indeed Aitmatov began as a Kirghiz writer, and his early works were standard, if accomplished, examples of what Rasul Gamzatov scorns as "dagger and bracelet literature," or local color exotica.2 For at least two decades, however, Aitmatov has written in Russian, has addressed issues of importance to the Soviet Union as a whole, and has increasingly claimed the role of great novelist, which in Russia means, of course, that he should be moralist, philosopher, and politician, as well as artist. Plakha is Aitmatov's most ambitious attempt to describe both cause and cure for the Soviet malaise, but the confusion, as well as hostility, that the book has provoked illustrates clearly the fundamentally different cultural assumptions that, for all he and his readers may share the Soviet experience, still separate Aitmatov from the greatest part of his audiencenative Russians. Soviet critics have greeted Plakha with a diversity of opinion unusual even in the era of glasnost. After the first installment appeared in Novyi inir, Aitmatov was accused of "flirting with God" and of "incompetence" in his chosen subject matter.3 Following the next two installments, some critics rhapsodized: One gushed, "we are on the eve of the end of the second millennium, and Aitmatov's book comes like an accounting of the second millennium before the first, an accounting for all of our era,"4 while another, more measured, called the novel "a difficult success."5 Far more common was the opinion that for all the strengths of certain portions, the book as a whole is a jumbled pastiche without coherent structure. Indeed the novel is difficult even to paraphrase. Plakha contains two wholly separate, nonintersecting plots, with distinct locales, characters, and even narrative styles. The shorter, occupying the last third of the novel, tells of Boston Urkunchiev, a leading shepherd on a Kirghiz sovkhoz, and, like other Aitmatov heroes, "a real laborer . . . one of those on whom, as the saying goes, the earth must rest."6 The longer, and more sensational, plot is the story of Avdii Kallistratov, a unique Aitmatov hero in that he is