While historians have given ample attention to stories of entrepreneurship, invention, and labor conflict, they have told us little about actual work-places and how people worked. Workers seldom wrote about their daily employment. However, they did leave behind their tools, products, shops, and factories as well as the surrounding industrial landscapes and communities. In this book, Gordon and Malone look at the industrialization of North America from the perspective of the industrial archaeologist. Using material evidence from such varied sites as Indian steatite quarries, automobile plants, and coal mines, they examine manufacturing technology, transportation systems, and the effects of industrialization on the land. Their research greatly expands our understanding of industry and focuses attention on the contributions of anonymous artisans whose skills shaped our industrial heritage.

Texture analysis is an important generic research area of machine vision. The potential areas of application include biomedical image analysis, industrial inspection, analysis of satellite or aerial imagery, content-based retrieval from image databases, document analysis, biometric person authentication, scene analysis for robot navigation, texture synthesis for computer graphics and animation, and image coding. Texture analysis has been a topic of intensive research for over three decades, but the progress has been very slow.A workshop on “Texture Analysis in Machine Vision” was held at the University of Oulu, Finland, in 1999, providing a forum for presenting recent research results and for discussing how to make progress in order to increase the usefulness of texture in practical applications. This book contains extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the workshop. The first part of the book deals with texture analysis methodology, while the second part covers various applications. The book gives a unique view of different approaches and applications of texture analysis. It should be of great interest both to researchers of machine vision and to practitioners in various application areas.

Visual pattern analysis is a fundamental tool in mining data for knowledge. Computational representations for patterns and texture allow us to summarize, store, compare, and label in order to learn about the physical world. Our ability to capture visual imagery with cameras and sensors has resulted in vast amounts of raw data, but using this information effectively in a task-specific manner requires sophisticated computational representations. We enumerate specific desirable traits for these representations: (1) intraclass invariance—to support recognition; (2) illumination and geometric invariance for robustness to imaging conditions; (3) support for prediction and synthesis to use the model to infer continuation of the pattern; (4) support for change detection to detect anomalies and perturbations; and (5) support for physics-based interpretation to infer system properties from appearance. In recent years, computer vision has undergone a metamorphosis with classic algorithms adapting to new trends in deep learning. This text provides a tour of algorithm evolution including pattern recognition, segmentation and synthesis. We consider the general relevance and prominence of visual pattern analysis and applications that rely on computational models.

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry covers the period 1760 to 1900, a time of dramatic change in the material world as objects shifted from the handmade to the machine made. The revolution in making, and in consuming the things which were made, impacted on lives at every scale –from body to home to workplace to city to nation. Beyond the explosion in technology, scientific knowledge, manufacturing, trade, and museums, changes in class structure, politics, ideology, and morality all acted to transform the world of objects. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Carolyn White is Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte