Colin Berry has been adding to his posting, Not all images that are 3D-enhancible have ‘encoded 3D information’. Click in and, if you have already read his posting, scroll down about halfway to Update: Sunday 8 June. He had made some interesting observations about ImageJ. Personally, I’m finding the software confusing and some options limited. Colin is helping all of us to see how confusing using ImageJ can be.
Final gasp (on this over-long posting): there was a curious and unexpected feature of those 3D images where 4 different images were tested together. Switching between Invert On versus Off in Image J did not produce so marked a transformation as expected (one expects the image to be turned inside out, like punching a hat to make a new one with the lining on the outside).
Read on. It’s not that I don’t understand Colin. I do. It’s ImageJ that I am struggling with. Having said that, however, I still think this package is much more powerful than the VP-8 Image Analyzer. Once we figure it out more completely, we may be able learn a great deal more about the image on the shroud.
Link to previous posting in this blog: Colin Berry is up with an interesting posting about 3D enhancement
The above picture is from Colin’s site.
An idea has just occurred to me over a glass of vin de pays in Provence (well, two actually, but modest sized ones you realize).
Suppose one took the 3D-enhancible Shroud Scope image of the TS with its allegedly encoded 3D information (with “unique” properties not present in other images). Suppose one screen-grabbed that picture, pasted to MS Paint where it’s then in bitmap format – just a collection of pixels. Suppose one then put the latter into ImageJ and were to find it was also 3D enhancible using the same settings. Could one conclude that the TS image was essentially no different to the host of other images that can be 3D-enhanced in ImageJ (flags etc that have no 3D history)?
No, I haven’t done the experiment yet, but might, especially if someone here were to predict that the bitmap image will lose the 3D-enhancibility of the digitized parent (Durante 2002) image in the Shroud Scope starter.
Not entirely sure what you mean. All my playing about with ImageJ and the Shroud has been done with screengrabs of this and that, mostly ShroudScope, as there is no other way of capturing it. The difference between the Shroud and the flags is that the flags are really flat, while the ‘man on the shroud’ was three dimensional, and his ImageJ image seems to reflect that, albeit not very well. Incidentally, have a go at the model of Shakespeare at http://www.grand-illusions.com/acatalog/Shakespeare_Hollow_Face.html where the original 3D figure is white all over, including the eyes and hair. Knocks the shroud image into a cocked hat, in my opinion.
For anything so subtle as “encoded 3D information” the data would surely need to be encoded in vectorial format, i.e. as mathematical relationships describing “objects”.
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/aboutgraphics/a/bitmapvector_2.htm
But as you say, bitmap is the preferred format for images that are not cartoon-like, and which are merely collections of pixels. So how can anyone hope to claim scientifically that the Shroud image has unique 3D-encoding, given its bitmap constitution that we all download makes it no different from a host of other images that are also bitmap, and which also, like flags, respond to 3D-enhancement in ImageJ etc.?
To transform a grey scale or a half tone map into distance, one has to have a scientific model.
It’s only according to a given model that one can translate these data into distance.
ImageJ is just a very poor surrogate, and there may be a lot of misuse and misunderstanding.
Dan,
you wrote:” Personally, I’m finding the software [ImageJ] confusing and some options limited”.
And:
“It’s ImageJ that I am struggling with. Having said that, however, I still think this package is much more powerful than the VP-8 Image Analyzer. Once we figure it out more completely, we may be able learn a great deal more about the image on the shroud.”
Can you explain that ? Your first sentence seems to be contradictory to the second one.