Keynote Lecture - From X to Z via Y: The Fusion of Image Analysis and Synthetic Graphics
Dr John Patterson, University of Glasgow
Abstract
Since the earliest days of raster displays, graphics has owed a grudgingly
acknowledged debt to image processing and its handmaiden, digital signal
processing (DSP). Classical DSP is developed in one dimension, as is
Fourier and wavelet analysis, (so X) but the application of these
techniques in digital displays is in two dimensions (so now also Y).
Finally modern methods of image analysis from stereo pairs or monocular
multiples (movie sequences) using close photogrammetry can give us depth
information on everything we can see (so, finally, Z). In order to do this
image analysis to the highest accuracy we need to use methods more
appropriate to the Computer Aided Design community, while the analysis
itself relies on techniques derived from neurophysiology but which have
found their most advanced expression from within the Geography community.
Although having the appearance of a raid on interdisciplinarity, this
fusion of ideas actually reinforces the scholarship of synthetic
graphics,while repaying the gesture by picking its pockets. The chief
beneficiaries of all this are the digital media industry, who have an
insatiable need for capturing 3D models from the real world to put into
games and interactive movies, not to mention opening up digital image
sequences to the whole range of 3d synthetic graphics techniques.