Over the last decade, visibility and sexuality have become a major theme in Spanish and Cuban cinema, literature and art. Vision Machines explores this development in the light of contemporary history and recent theoretical accounts of sight by writers including Paul Virilio, Gianni Vattimo and Teresa de Lauretis. The very visible women of Almodóvar’s cinema are Paul Julian Smith’s first subject. He shows how, in his early Dark Habits, lesbianizes the look, putting women’s pleasure at the centre of the frame, and then examines Almodóvar’s recent film, Kika, where the conflict between cinema and video is played out in the bodies of women: good, bad and ugly. Moving the focus to Cuba, Smith discussed the reception in Europe and North America of Nestor Almendro’s remarkable documentary on gays in Cuba, Improper Conduct, and traces the trial of visibility to which effeminate men were exposed. He compares Amendor’s work with the autobiography of exile novelist Reinaldo Arenas, which revels in graphic sex, and also looks at the first Cuban film with a gay theme, Gutierrez Alea’s Strawberry and Chocolate. Smith returns to Spain to consider the response of artists and intellectuals to the public invisibility of AIDS in a country with one of the highest rates of HIV transmission in the Eurpean Union. Drawing on Anglo-American debates on the representation of AIDS, he concentrates on the one major intervention by Spanish scholars and artists, Love and Rage, and on the only figure in any medium to address AIDS in his aesthetic practice, the conceptual artist and video-maker Pepe Espaliu. He concludes with a fascinating account of Julio Medem’s pathbreaking film from 1993, The Red Squirrel, which has opened up a new approach to two formerly taboo subjects: Basque nationalism and female sexuality.

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"Since the early 1980s, American artist and filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority ... Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines explores how she has extended and contested the paradigm of experimental cinema over the last four decades."--Page 4 of cover.

With the demands of quality management and process control in an industrial environment machine vision is becoming an important issue. This handbook of machine vision is written by experts from leading companies in this field. It goes through all aspects of image acquisition and image processing. From the viewpoint of the industrial application the authors also elucidate in topics like illumination or camera calibration. Attention is paid to all hardware aspects, starting from lenses and camera systems to camera-computer interfaces. Besides the detailed hardware descriptions the necessary software is discussed with equal profoundness. This includes sections on digital image basics as well as image analysis and image processing. Finally the user is introduced to general aspects of industrial applications of machine vision, such as case studies and strategies for the conception of complete machine vision systems. With this handbook the reader will be enabled not only to understand up to date systems for machine vision but will also be qualified for the planning and evaluation of such technology.

Super-Intelligent Machines combines neuroscience and computer science to analyze future intelligent machines. It describes how they will mimic the learning structures of human brains to serve billions of people via the network, and the superior level of consciousness this will give them. Whereas human learning is reinforced by self-interests, this book describes the selfless and compassionate values that must drive machine learning in order to protect human society. Technology will change life much more in the twenty-first century than it has in the twentieth, and Super-Intelligent Machines explains how that can be an advantage.

Pattern Recognitions by Humans and Machines, Volume 2: Visual Perceptions covers aspects of research on visual perception. The book discusses visual form perception, figure-ground organization, and the spatial and temporal responses of the visual system; eye movements; and visual pattern perception. The text also describes a computer vision model based on psychophysical experiments; perspectives from brain theory and artificial intelligence; and the capacity to extract shape properties and spatial relations among objects and objects' parts. Knowledge-mediated perception is also considered. Psychologists and people involved in the study of visual perceptions will find the book useful.

In honour of Professor Erkki Oja, one of the pioneers of Independent Component Analysis (ICA), this book reviews key advances in the theory and application of ICA, as well as its influence on signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining. Examples of topics which have developed from the advances of ICA, which are covered in the book are: A unifying probabilistic model for PCA and ICA Optimization methods for matrix decompositions Insights into the FastICA algorithm Unsupervised deep learning Machine vision and image retrieval A review of developments in the theory and applications of independent component analysis, and its influence in important areas such as statistical signal processing, pattern recognition and deep learning A diverse set of application fields, ranging from machine vision to science policy data Contributions from leading researchers in the field