Several readers of my blog were commenting on the photos taken by Quince No.2 and provided links to sites that discuss the possibility of alteration of the photos by TEPCO.
The discussion is particularly about the photo No.1 released by TEPCO. I looked, and at first it didn't register. Then, I did see it. The same image repeated, of what looks to be the peeling paint, in the lower left corner:
One of the sites that my readers linked, a French blog, is comparing this photo with the screen shot taken from the video No.6 by Quince No.2, which does not show this "double".
Did TEPCO alter the photo? But why would TEPCO want to alter the photo of what looks like a guard rail? I started watching the video No.6, and noticed that at about 3:08 the main screen goes blank and filled with 16 yellow panels, and over the next 4 to 5 seconds the screen comes back to life again. It looks like some kind of malfunction of Quince.
Then, yet another reader chimed in, urging a close look at the video No.6 at 3:12. So I watched again, and the screen shot from 3:12 is below.
Indeed, there seems to be a double image. It then quickly resolves into a normal image. I think the screen shot at the French blog was taken at 3:14. Here's the screen shot at 3:14.
It still doesn't 100% add up. Why would TEPCO use this image with a double, instead of an image from a few seconds earlier or later? Just plain sloppy?
For now, please excuse Quince No.2 for the double take. It was its first ever job in the high radiation environment.
Here's Video No.6, from which the "controversial" photo (aka Quince's first screwup) was taken:
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21 comments:
Wow and even badly faked!
Interesting is that the high resolution image and the screen shot look markedly different. The high resolution image has been modified...
So the realy question is what do they have to hide?
Ummm.... the whole point of the post was to show that it is NOT a fake.
I appreciate your humor Ex Skf. I sometimes forget to relax and your posts today made me smile. I, for one would like to see Quince 1 come home to a ticker tape parade after going under such a clinical trial. Quince 1 was sent into do an impossible job and thus Quince 2 comes to the rescue. I would hate to see that Quince 2 ends up camping out together in the long run.
Also, I am secretly hoping Quince 1 has the loot left by Tepco at reactor 2. Reactor 1 has a "tent" while reactor 4 has people dismantling it. Sadly, reactor 3 has been left to fend for itself. Quince 1 needs to get out and tell us its story while keeping the "loot" to itself.
I am still thinking about what was going on and why the images on the video (taken from the operator's console) are that different from the still image (see also my comments in Ex-SKF's previous article).
The discrepancy between the lo-res image (on the operator's console in the video) and the hi-res image also could be because the camera possibly operates in two modes: continuous scanning only a part of the sensor (low-res video) and completely scanning the sensor (high-res still image).
But all this is speculation for now, until Tepco tells us some technical background.
However I think Tepco should regularly prophylactically exchange Quince2's electronics which are under constant radiation bombarding to avoid it to become a MIA too.
Maybe a worker was ashamed and hung himself and "the company" doesn't have any spare blank doctors notes saying " died of natural causes not related to radiation"? So, they Photoshoped it....
The edges of the patched area appear irregular and somewhat feathered together when viewed at full magnification.
I think that either they manually touched up the edges of the corrupted area to make an honest transmission error look less obvious, or Quince's software uses some stitching algorithm to automatically blend the individual sections together as you would when composing a panorama.
Either way, its still 'photoshopped'.
Wondering if Q2 will be able to get images of the SFP. As this is the only building with a blowout panel that is open, it would be useful to know if the emissions exiting through that space are/were from the SFP or the RPV.
I have a screen grab from the Live Cam yesterday showing huge amount of drifting steam/smoke so thick you cannot see unit 1!
It is at
http://flyingcuttlefish.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/breaking-fukushima-covered-in-smoke/
My question is: is unit 2 even there anymore??
James, thank you for hinting at this.
Horizontally the "stitching" of the doubled image tile appears to be clearly jagged when watched magnified. Vertically there is jagging, too, but wider-spaced and less sharply.
The first column is wider than the second one, so the second column and the right part of the first column has somehow been duplicated. I am really not sure how to interpret this. Camera chips' internal structuring is usually in columns of same width (powers of two). Either Quince's camera or its controller got radiation bugged or something/someone else modified the image, it could even be a software bug. Camera chips are particularly sensitive as they cannot be coated with a shielding varnish which is mandatory at DRAMs, for example, to prevent soft errors due to cosmic and other radiation particles.
Something is definitely not correct there anyway.
Hope Tepco will explain this mystery.
@flyingcuttlefish:
Regularly there are discussions about what is happening in the nightly fog. These are like doomsday prophecies. Just wait for the next day, and usually the world then still exists :)
If you look at the high-res image, the 'pait flake' is definately duplicated, but its not a software bug orcamera error. The upper left is an irregular cloudy shape, the sort you get from using the airbrush in photoshop. It obscures the handrail,and merges into the background floor. The vertical crack is clearly a copy of the one near the paint flake.
The 'smokin gun' is the irregular edge.If this was a camera or other automated repair to the image, then the reapir edge would be a regular shape (circle,rectangle, ellipse, etc). This has been modified by man.
Why? In the low res image there is a black object lying near the handrail, which is obscured by thi alteration. Wonder what it is, clearly we are not allowed to see it?
Oops,sorry about the typing...got my mucking keys fuddled
'paint flake'
'this alteration'
and lots of spelling errors...[Embarrasment]
I'd say it's a stitching error. It appears Quince takes a bunch of stills and the software then grabs the centers and makes a panorama.
probably due to the high radiation, teh camera glitched.
no big deal.
My guess from viewing the video (even before the duplicate area was pointed out):
When those tiles come up, the internal computer of Quince transmits the high res picture tile by tile, the control computer or laptop stitches them together like the panorama function of some cameras does. The single tile images may be taken by using a low res camera and tilting and panning it inbetween to get higher resolution. A similar system is used in NASA robots for exporing the moon and planets.
Because the rail (I think it's a rail) is so close to Quince when the picture is taken, the panning and tilting makes it appear in two of those tiles, and the stitching software just blends those pictures into each other.
I may be wrong, but things like these happen. Google street view and Google Earth have the same issues, except for not beeing so close to the object of course...
Some more observations.
The video transmission gets stuck/blanked out two times when the radioactivity on the counter exceeds about 0.2 sieverts at the fence at minute 3.
Look closely at the mission time counter - it gets skipping then for up to 11 seconds when the image blanked.
Looks like the camera electronics had to be reset several times by its watchdog electronic due to radiation hang-ups. (Remember, the counter's readings in 1 meter height might be misleading, the radiation field might actually be multi-sieverts near the floor where the electronics are situated)
So data errors are very possible even if part of the data is checksum-protected.
However, as anon 2:52 probably correctly states, the jagged stitching of the doubled image puts up the suspicion of "manual intervention". This kind of stitching isn't observable in other parts of the images, and there are better algorithms for automatic seamless stitching of multiple images into a panoramic.
As Tepco has a "good" reputation of faking information, they really should explain what happened there.
If it was a mere "over-doing" of some press releases editor it would be quite harmless in contrast of the former manipulations Tepco is reknown for.
OT:
By the way, when putting up the question about the background of these image manipulations in the physicsforums, I got insta-banned there.
This doesn't wonder me much, as I expected this to happen sooner or later as practically every poster who too insistently asks questions that are uncomfortable to the nuclear industry gets banned there.
We have to be aware of the fact that the physicsforums is owned by Scientific American, which in turn is owned by the German-based strictly pro-nuclear Holtzbrinck group.
This media group owns the influential trade newspaper "Handelsblatt", which is known in Germany for its massive foaming against the nuclear exit the German chancellor Angela Merkel (an applied physicist like Naoto Kan) did.
The Handelsblatt is reknown for its audacious pro-nuclear lying, its most recent big lie was head-lining that Germany were about to restart its now-decommissioned nuclear plants (whose licenses have expired) in winter when some part of Germany had to import electricity from Austria.
What they didn't tell about was the true background:
France had to turn off several nuclear plants due to low river water levels in winter and to massively import electricity from the wind farms in Northern Germany.
And as the German electric grid was on full load supplying electricity from Northern Germany to nuclear France, some part of Southern Germany had to import a little bit of electricity from Austria to avoid cutting off France from the dire-needed electricity.
You see how much lying is done by the nuclear lobby...
Atomfritz, welcome to the club of the banned. Well, I got so many warnings and infractions from the mods at Physics Forums that I stopped posting in disgust. No big loss for me, or you.
Thanks for the info on who owns the thing.
Just to clarify, the human editing I referred to is in the high-res still image. I work as a senior developer, and that edit isdone manually with the cloning tool in a photoshop style program.
The video double image could well be some software problem, since its a rectangular panel, and the video is clearly made by assembling rectangles to create the full view.
However the loss of video is convienient since Quince is right next to the hidden spot in the high res still image. Was Quince taking a closer look at the hidden item at the time?
Anon 2:52
What the hell.. Atomfritz, I didn't know you got banned.
I consider a banning at PF to be a badge of honour, and you are a most honourable person, Atomfritz.
One must only ponder facts on PF, even if the so-called facts are disinfo from J Gov and TEPCO, and not ever show an ounce of concern or question a motive because then you are a know-nothing fear-monger compared to the incredible geniuses there busy calculating numbers that don't add up.
Fuck you Physics Forums, I take a dump as a toast to your "science" coming before humanity.
I don't know if the video-editing software has this feature, but in Photoshop there is a feature called "rubberstamp." It's like using the "paintbrush" feature except, instead of using a color or pattern to "paint" with, you can click on a paintbrush-sized part of the image to copy it, then move to another place in the image and click to paste it in.
This is a simple and easy way to get rid of stuff like wrinkles and hickies, or even out a texture, or cover up something you don't want to be seen.
So maybe there is something in that frame they didn't want others to see.
I've been having a look at the video to analyse the yellow squares a bit.
There are two instances where the yellow squares, actually rectangles, appear. Note that the rectangles on the left are wider than the three columns on the rest of the
image. The rectangles appear at one go and then disappear (uncover) one at a time, but they don't do so at the same speed, the last one stays a lot longer. I will
check the frame counts.
The two instances of yellow blocks occur at Mission Timer 126:15-126:27 (video time 0:03:06.667-0:03:12.167) and 127:34-127:56 (video time 0:03:46.167-0:03:56.000).
Note that these are different in length. The earlier instance is followed by a couple of frames with the legend "LOST 11[sec]" overprinted rotated 90 degrees. Hummm
this does not appear on the second gap... why, I wonder, in parentheses.
I would like to explain what I think these are, bearing in mind my background is systems NOT electronics, we deal in behaviours, inputs-outputs, black boxes.
On both these occasions the preceding frames are flared out in the bottom left corner. I think that Q2 is following a wall and is having a peek at the flary bright
light on the other side of the wall at two separate places. What happens after the yellow squares is that the flared out light, which seems to be from the base of the
wall, has been reduced somehow in order to get a clean visualisation of it.
I don't know if it's light from a window, or intense radiation, or steam. But what I THINK is happening is that Q2 is having its iris adjusted to provide a cleaner
image of whatever that thick line of light is. But it must be of interest to whoever is getting the robot to capture the images.
The second instance of yellow squares - all but the last two at bottom left disappear in just 20 frames, the penultimate in 5 frames and the final one at bottom left
takes 36 frames to disappear. While it is disappearing you can see that in the penultimate rectangle to its right a very clear, unflared, demarcation of the brightness
at the top of (?) the wall.
The first instance, all but the last rectangle disappear in 28 frames, the last one takes 8, again, longer than the others but not as long as the other instance which
took 36.
If I was going to deduce anything from this, it might be that the switching on and off of the yellow squares took place while the robot was on survey, and this was
done manually. It's at the back of my mind that some other imaging is being captured, though of what I could not have a clue.
Another thing to note hear is that the yellow does not COMPLETELY blot out what's being hidden underneath it. You can see faint images of lines and rectangles which
correspond to real images when the yellow has been switched off.
I started this, with the photoshopped birdy beaks in view. But maybe some of the above will be interesting for someone else to follow up. And me, back to the birdy
beaks later.
Misitu.
Misitu, that are interesting observations.
Somehow I didn't notice that short, almost sublimial "11 secs missing" message before. The video player probably skipped frames due to high cpu load when I had many programs active on the pc.
After disallowing the player to skip frames and watching the vid frame by frame I could look at this frame closely (at 3:12).
The second instance doesn't show this 11 sec message, but the mission timer halted for 11 sec.
(As the video was recorded with only 4 frames/sec, the xx sec missing message could have been there, but just in a moment that wasn't recorded on the video)
And, after the video display get restored, there are two frames in which in the middle left of the camera view some bar with a number indicator appears. Would like to know what this is (at 3:58).
And, looking at the radiation indicators there are to be found some more hints.
First radiation indicator is the counter (middle upper video).
Second, (indirect) radiation indicator is the middle left video (that one with the rotating mass).
This one shows the characteristic white pixels indicating radiation.
The white pixels vary in intensity, they are most intensive at the fence, sometimes the camera freezes.
Only in the staircase with its "low" radiation there are (almost) no white pixels.
Plus, it sometimes also freezes for some frames where the radiation is very high.
This also could be an indicator for the cameras/electronics getting hanged by the radiation and then being reset/restarted,
So I assume the radiation is possibly quite higher than the 2xx millisieverts being displayed, as some say that Quince should be able to withstand 2 sieverts.
The blanking (yellow squares) could be either due to radiation crashes/resets/restarts (which I deem probable) or due to camera mode change between low resolution video to high res photo (which I think is improbable).
Would like to learn more of your (and other people's) observations, as I am no forensic expert and there are definitely some strange inconsistencies.
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