Erkki Kurenniemi (In 2048) (preliminary work towards) an online archive
This part of the website gives access to a series of data we extracted from a series of documents rescued from the hard drives of Erkki Kurenniemi. We have been working on the contents of a folder named “kuvia” — Finnish for images — and just one of several folders of images. Of the approximately 17000 images, 12000 have EXIF data. These data give us technical characteristics of the images as diverse as the date, the focus length, the make of the camera.
For different reasons, the images cannot be posted on the web as they exist on Erkki's hard drives. The images rights are not cleared yet and disputes regarding privacy rights will probably make it hard to publish a large part of them. Additionally, for reasons documented here, we are considering that the practice of image making and taking of Kurenniemi can be approached from a wide variety of angles that do not imply the traditional display of the images as such. Therefore, this interface doesn't give access to the images in their usual form but to different points of view on the images. Computer vision algorithms like face detection, contour detection, color measurement and meta-data extraction are combined to give a multi-faceted commentary on the image file.
An index lists all the files ordered by date and time of the image's capture. The color of the date in the interface corresponds to the average of the colors contained in the image. By clicking on the date's link, one can access a second page where all the information gathered about the image is displayed in a two rows grid.

In the first row:
  • The left-hand cell side contains, when available, a representation of the dominant RGB color of the image. When the difference between the color components of a pixel results in a value higher than 30 for the dominant color, the pixel is printed. For example, when an image has red as the dominant component, all the pixels of the image where the red value is 30 above the green and the blue components are printed.
  • The middle cell contains when available a representation of the contours detected in the image. The detection is done using the library OpenCV using the Hough transform.
  • The right-hand cell contains when available an image showing rectangles where faces have been detected on the image using a built-in algorithm of the OpenCV library.
In the second row:
  • The left-hand cell contains the date of capture of the photograph. The background color is the average color of the image.
  • The middle cell contains a description made from the different informations gathered from the extraction of the EXIF metadata.
  • The right-hand cell contains when available a histogram of the image colors displaying the values of the RGB components of the image.