Discovering physics and design trends from visual temporal structures

Living in a constantly changing world, we cannot help but notice the temporal regularities of visual changes around us. These changes can be irreversible governed by physical laws, such as glass bottles broken into pieces, or influenced by design trends, such as web pages adopting templates with larger background images. In this dissertation, we build computational models to discover and apply the knowledge of the physics for arrow of time, and the design trends for web pages from image sequences. In the first part of the thesis, I train models to learn the visual cues that are indicative of the arrow of time from large real world video datasets. In the second part of the thesis, I investigate the evolution of visual cues and layout in web page design through screenshots over time. The knowledge of these visual temporal structures are not only of scientific interest by themselves, but also of practical uses demonstrated in this thesis.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Wei, Donglai

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William T. Freeman.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117319

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/117319