Throw away the so called progressive overlay. I trust my eyes more.
I think the man in the Akiane painting, in the ISA mosaic and on the Turin Shroud
are possibly the same person.
A reader writes:
Why not have the three images submitted to facial recognition programs, using a random set of head-on male facial images, then a subset with facial hair?
A lot of facial recognition, explicitly or not, is based on certain ratios/portions between centers of eyes, mouth (upper lip), nose tip, and widths for these, because they are invariants under "facial expressions" reflecting deformations by facial muscular movements. Then there are various other characteristics, which are variable, adjusting for relative point of view.
Another reader writes:
Phil Dayvault may be a ‘Shroud scholar and a former FBI Special Agent — in the field of forensic analysis’ but this video mishmash would never last five minutes under scrutiny from a defense attorney in a courtroom. Show me the original photos without any size adjustments. Now resize them for convergence, which is permissible, but without changing any proportions whatsoever. In other words no stretching, no skewing, no tilting, no rotating, no concaving, no convexing, etc. More over no doing this with features like eyes, noses, etc. No smiling. No frowning. Do a paper that shows that there is no fiddling. Then I will be impressed. Show me source photographs and documentation. How were these photographed? The distortion from a 28mm lens is extraordinary. And images off the internet are often swizzled to fit a page or something.
The only way to go is use facial recognition software.
(or human recognition, I say).
Here is an interesting article: Facebook’s facial recognition software is now as accurate as the human brain, but what now?
Facebook’s facial recognition research project, DeepFace (yes really), is now very nearly as accurate as the human brain. DeepFace can look at two photos, and irrespective of lighting or angle, can say with 97.25% accuracy whether the photos contain the same face. Humans can perform the same task with 97.53% accuracy.
Throw away the so called progressive overlay. I trust my eyes more. I think the man in the Akiane painting, in the ISA mosaic and on the Turin Shroud Man are possibly the same person.
I fail to see the point of using modern Facial Recognition software in attempting to match the Issa mosaic with the Shroud face. I might be more persuaded by positive correlation results of comparing artists’ portraits with true-life photographs of their particular subjects; Or for that matter correlations among a broad selection of the various depictions of alleged copies of the Mandylion.
The mosaic is an artist’s representation of his subject, quite possibly the Mandylion face. However we cannot put ourselves in the place of the artist, we do not know his intention, nor his artistic views on realistic portrayals, nor how he viewed his subject, whether it was from memory or simultaneous observation. He was constrained by the materials he had to hand, randomly shaped pieces of coloured glass or pottery, which he had to fit together as best he could. The Issa is not a modern-day photograph, nor is it of divine or miraculous origin. It is a human hand-crafted work, using a particular medium! Its claim to to being remarkable would seem to rest solely on its amazing survival in Edessa, where everything else Christian was destroyed by Turkish invaders in 1146.
It was I wrote that Phil was a “former FBI Special Agent who worked in the field of forensic science” on another thread, quoted above, but the reason was to defend him as a serious Shroud scholar,not someone playing with an artefact “of unknown provenance”. The non-Christian archaeologist identified the face as “Isa” (Jesus), Ian Wilson accepted the identification and so did Phil, who saw it before Wilson did.
As pointed out by me yesterday the mosaic depicting Jesus’ face is very similar to the icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus at the Kiev Museum in Ukraine, which was formerly preserved at the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, and is dated to the 6th century. It is reproduced in IWs last Shroud book, plate 19c.
The doubts lie in hooking on Jesus’ face to NDEs, as experiments demonstrate that people see different things, some see a light at the end of a dark tunnel, others claim to have met dead relatives, someone else see strange beings in the form of bright light and so forth. The mind-matter problem is still a mystery and so far we seem to be stuck at the level of the unconscious when it comes to NDE.
There’s no evidence from what I can tell that connects the face on the tile to the shroud or mandylion. I think it probably depicts Jesus but to make a jump to the shroud is a leap of faith. Doubting Thomas
Thomas, the evidence is circumstantial and must be considered. It was unearthed in Edessa, the centre of the cult of the mandylion and its home from 540AD to 944AD. Syriac monks carried copies of the mandylion throughout the Christian Middle East. I would have to agree with Louis, that it has quite a striking resemblance to the icon now at Kiev formerly at St Cathenine’s, Sinai. Both Wilson and Guscin are expert art critics and have extensive experience in surveying very many representations of the mandylion. They assign the mosaic to 550-650AD; as such it would have been among some of the earliest copies. In a previous posting, I commented on other 2nd-3rd cenury mosaics found in Edessa, particularly some family representations. The men there have bushy hair and beards, but the styles are quite different from the mosaic. The ISSA has very large owlish eyes, typical of many mandylion representations. It also needs to be remembered that mosaic work is a less compliant medium than painting, and exactitude cannot be expected.