27/06/2018

IMPA and IMS establish partnership focused on photographic collection.

Rua do Ouvidor, em 1890. Foto de Marc Ferrez

Karine Rodrigues

Imagine strolling down Ouvidor Street, lined with perfumeries, shop windows displaying the latest Parisian fashions, cafes, and pastry shops, moving seamlessly without bumping into anyone, amidst top hats and ornate hairdos, like the scene captured by Marc Ferrez in 1890. Thanks to a partnership with IMPA, new ways of enjoying the invaluable photographic collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) will emerge, perhaps even immersive experiences in iconic spaces of Rio de Janeiro's history.

Prestigious in their respective fields, IMPA and IMS signed, this Monday (25), a collaboration agreement for research, a promising step that will show how productive and valuable the intersection between institutes dedicated to Mathematics and culture can be.

No IMPA: Bruno Buccalon, Julia Giannella, Luiz Velho, Marcelo Viana, Flávio Pinheiro e Sergio Burgi

The collaboration will take place through Visgraf, the Computer Graphics Laboratory of IMPA – created in 1989, with extensive expertise in the field and a series of national and international partnerships with renowned institutions – and the Photography Coordination of IMS.

With 2 million images, the collection brings together one of the most important 19th-century collections in Brazil, including that of the pioneer Marc Ferrez (1843-1923), the leading photographer of the period. It also has significant archives from almost the entire 20th century and prioritizes incorporating records from the current century.

Praia de Ipanema em 1895. Foto de Marc Ferrez

IMPA's Director-General, Marcelo Viana, praised the convergence between the two institutions. Visgraf coordinator Luiz Velho considered the partnership a way to validate and transfer the work developed at IMPA to society. "It's a way to enhance Brazilian culture. The IMS collection is invaluable and, honestly, we can do unprecedented things," he said, estimating that the collaboration agreement will be long-term.

The executive superintendent of IMS, Flávio Pinheiro, observed that, given the institution's vast collection, it is inevitable to consider the impact of new technologies. “It's an immense task and a path we needed to explore. I think georeferencing is a start, something important, but there are unsuspected things ahead, such as what artificial intelligence and machine learning can do with the images.”

Armazém Caravella, na rua Catumbi, em 1922. Foto de Augusto Malta

Platform enables immersive experience.

Dedicated to computational mathematics applied to media, an area marked by integration, Visgraf conducts research in diverse fields such as image visualization and processing, animation and multimedia, and virtual and augmented reality, with projects ranging from the development of audiovisual narratives and virtual reality systems to data monitoring and visualization platforms, among others.

For those who still find the connection between mathematics and photography strange, it's worth knowing that algorithms can be developed, for example, to extract information from images. Techniques can allow computers to recognize faces or objects in large databases, such as the IMS database.

“Essentially, you have a mathematical model that is an abstraction of representations of some kind, and everything revolves around that. The area we work in at Visgraf ranges from very technical things, like this super-resolution aspect—taking an image and being able to enlarge it beyond the limit at which the photo was captured by the equipment—to analyzing the image and understanding how to articulate it in other contexts. A photo has metadata that can be referenced,” Velho noted.

Avenida Central, atual Rio Branco, em 1906. Foto de Marc Ferrez

According to the agreement, IMPA loaned IMS a unique piece of equipment in Brazil, developed by Google, which combines various applications for content visualization. The Liquid Galaxy is a platform consisting of screens with an angle of approximately 180 degrees that allow a panoramic view of videos and photos, enabling interactive tours in an immersive 3D environment. It will be used in research and demonstrations, Velho explained, regarding the innovation donated to IMPA by the American company End Point and already transferred to the IMS Photographic Technical Reserve in Gávea, in the southern zone of Rio de Janeiro.

Regarding the equipment, Sergio Burgi, photography coordinator at IMS, highlighted the enormous potential for interaction when various databases, such as photographs and maps, among others, are brought together on a common platform. “There are many possibilities that are not yet being effectively implemented in collections. Reconciling intellectual and technical metadata is an absurdly new challenge in the field of information processing,” he emphasized.

Gradil do viaduto Santa Ifigênia, São Paulo, em 1945. Foto de Thomaz Farkas

The partnership will be managed by Visgraf research assistant Julia Giannella and the technical assistant from the IMS Photography Coordination, Bruno Buccalon. With the IMS's remarkable collection and IMPA's resources, Velho anticipates that the collaboration will be long and productive.

“It will work very well and with scientific rigor. I think we are in a holistic moment of humanity, of merging the exact and social sciences. This type of partnership that we are doing here is innovative. The sky is the limit,” concluded the Visgraf coordinator, enthusiastically, regarding the results of the agreement.