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Dartmouth does 3D study of backyard photo
#1
You should go to this link and check out this 2009 work:


http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/downlo...s/tr10.pdf


[size=12]A 3-D Photo Forensic Analysis of the
Lee Harvey Oswald Backyard Photo

[/SIZE]
Hany Farid
[size=12]Department of Computer Science
6211 Sudiko Lab
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755
603.646.2761 (tel)
603.646.1672 (fax)

farid@cs.dartmouth.edu

[/SIZE]
Abstract

More than forty-five years after the assassination of U.S. President Kennedy

theories continue to circulate suggesting that the accused assassin, Lee Har-

vey Oswald, acted as part of a larger conspiracy. It has been argued, for

example, that incriminating photographs of Oswald were manipulated, and

hence evidence of a broader plot. We describe a detailed 3-D analysis of the

Oswald photos to determine if such claims of tampering are warranted.

Keywords:
Photo Forensics, 3-D Photo Analysis

1. Introduction

United States President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Novem-

ber 22nd, 1963. Shortly afterwards, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and

charged with the crime. Because he was killed before his trial many ques-

tions surrounding the assassination remained unanswered. Since this time,

numerous theories have circulated suggesting that Oswald acted as part of a

larger criminal conspiracy involving a variety of government, international,

or criminal groups. Many of these theories point to purported inconsisten-

cies in the events of November 22nd and in the evidence collected against

Oswald. One such example is a photograph of Oswald in his backyard hol-

stering a pistol and holding a rie in one hand and Marxist newspapers in

the other, Figure 1. Oswald claimed that this photo was fake
[size=12]1[/SIZE]. In addition,

many have argued that the photo is riddled with multiple inconsistencies,

including inconsistent lighting, shadows, geometry, and proportions.

The Warren Commission [1] and the House Select Committee on

Assassinations [2] investigated claims of photo tampering and concluced that

they were unwarranted. Building on this earlier work, we describe a 3-D

photo forensic examination that allows for a quantitative analysis of these

scene properties. While only applied to this historic and controversial photo,

this 3-D modeling methodology is applicable to a broad range of photo foren-

sic situations.

2. 3-D Model

Well established techniques from photogrammetry [3] and computer vi-

sion [4] are often effective in making metric measurements from photographs.

When presented with only a single image, however, these techniques face fun-

damental limitations in terms of what can be measured. A 3-D model of a

scene records a richer representation and expands the range of measurements

that can be made. To illustrate this idea, we describe the construction and

subsequent analysis of a 3-D model of the Oswald backyard photo, Figure 1.

This model is constructed from five main parts: Oswald's head, Oswald's

body, the ground plane, portions of the surrounding building, and the posi-

tion of the light source (i.e., the sun).

In [5], the authors describe a 3-D morphable model for the analysis and

synthesis of human faces. The model was derived by collecting a large set of

3-D laser scanned faces and projecting them into a lower-dimensional linear

subspace. New faces (geometry, texture/color, and expressions) are modeled

as linear combinations of the resulting low-parameter linear basis. The model

parameters can be estimated from a paired prole and frontal image or from

only a single frontal image.

We are fortunate to have access to contemporaneous prole and frontal

views of Oswald in the form of a mugshot taken shortly after his arrest,

Figure 2. These photographs provide the ideal input for constructing a 3-

D model from the commercially available implementation of [5] (FaceGen,

[size=12]1
[/SIZE]
[size=12]We focus our analysis on only one of the three backyard photos, each of which show[/SIZE]
[size=12]
Oswald in his backyard with Marxist newspapers and a rie.

[/SIZE]
2

Singular Inversions
). Two views of the resulting 3-D model (Figure 3) show

a good agreement with the original mugshot photo in Figure 2.

This 3-D head model was combined with a generic articulated 3-D body
[size=12]2[/SIZE],

and rendered in the 3-D modeling software Maya (
Autodesk).[size=12]3 [/SIZE]The ground

plane, fence, and post under the stairs were created from simple 3-D primi-

tives. The scene geometry, camera position, and direction of a distant light

source (i.e., sun) were manually positioned until they matched the original

photo.

Shown in Figure 4 is, from left to right, the original photo, our 3-D

rendering, and a superposition of the original photo and the outline of our

rendering. This gure shows a good agreement between the model and the

original photo. Note that in this 3-D model both the scene geometry and

lighting position are estimated, allowing for both a geometric and lighting

analysis, as described next.

3. 3-D Analysis

Once constructed, a 3-D model records a powerful representation for the

quantitative measurement of scene properties. In this section the 3-D model

estimated in the previous section is used to analyze the lighting, shadows,

dimensions, and geometry in the backyard photo of Oswald.

Because of the inherent ambiguity in constructing a 3-D model from a

single 2-D image, there are any of a number of 3-D geometries that would

be consistent with the 2-D image. The model constructed here and the

subsequent analysis simply show that there exists a consistent and plausible

3-D scene geometry, as opposed to a unique geometry.

3.1. Shadow

It may appear that the shadow cast by Oswald's body onto the ground,

and the shadow under his nose are inconsistent with a single light source,

Figure 1, and hence evidence of photo tampering. Specifically, the nose

appears to be illuminated from above, and the body seems to be illuminated

from Oswald's upper left. It has previously been pointed out, however, that

[size=12]2
[/SIZE]
[size=12]Alfred 1.2.0: www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/alfred[/SIZE]
[size=12]
[/SIZE]
[size=12]3
[/SIZE]
[size=12]A more detailed body was not constructed (e.g., [6]), because we were primarily in-[/SIZE]
[size=12]
terested in the shadow cast by the body, and the height of Oswald in the photo, for which

a generic body sufficed.

[/SIZE]
3

the human visual system can be quite inept at judging inconsistencies in

lighting and shadows [7, 8, 9].

With a 3-D model of the scene geometry and lighting, it is relatively easy

to compare the shadows in the original photo and rendered scene. Shown in

Figure 5 is a side-by-side comparison of the shadows. Note that the shadows

on the nose, eyes, lower lip and neck are well matched, as are the shadow

cast by the body onto the ground plane, and the thin sliver of a shadow

from the vertical post onto the ground plane. These shadows, which at rst

glance appeared inconsistent, are in fact perfectly consistent with a single

light source.

3.2. Height

The backyard photo of Oswald in Figure 1 was considered to be partic-

ularly incriminating because the rifle he was holding in the photo appeared

to be the same as that used to assassinate Kennedy. It has been suggested,

however, that the relative size of the rifle in Oswald's hand is inconsistent

with Oswald's height. Our 3-D model can be used to determine relative di-

mensions in the 3-D scene. Most importantly, the 3-D model allows us to

remove any perspective distortions that would bias the measurements made

only from the original photo.

To begin, a cylinder was added to the 3-D model to mimic the rifle,

Figure 6. Shown in the right panel of Figure 6 is a rendering of Oswald and

the rifle where Oswald's articulated body was positioned upright and the

rifle was placed in the same depth plane as Oswald's body. In this photo,

the ratio of the length of the rifle to Oswald's height is 0:

5824. Oswald was

5 feet and 9 inches tall (69 inches), which allows us to infer the rifle length
l

as:

l

69

= 0
:5824 (1)

l
= 69 0:5824 = 40:186 inches (2)

According to the Warren Commission the rifle was 40
:2 inches in length [1],

only a fraction of an inch larger than that estimated from our 3-D model.

The rifle to height ratio measured directly from the original backyard

photo is 0
:6493 which would suggest a rifle length of 44:8 inches, several

inches longer than the recovered weapon. This type of analysis is, of course,

incorrect as it does not account for the obvious perspective and pose dis-

tortions in the photo. Our 3-D model allows for the removal of all such

distortions and, in turn, to make accurate scene measurements.

4

3.3. Posture

It has been argued that Oswald is leaning so far to the left as to be

physically implausible. Our 3-D model allows for arbitrary views of Oswald's

body and measurements of his posture. Shown in Figure 7 are four renderings

of Oswald's body taken from the front, back, and left and right sides, each of

which look qualitatively reasonable. The tilt of Oswald's body was measured

to be a physically plausible five degrees from vertical.

3.4. Chin

At first glance it may appear that Oswald's chin in the backyard photo is

too wide to be consistent with his chin in other photos (e.g., his mugshot) and

hence evidence of a photo composite. Shown in the left column of Figure 8

is a photo of Oswald from his mugshot (top) and from the backyard photo

(bottom). The yellow guidelines are drawn at the point in the top photo

where the chin meets the jaw line. Note that the chin appears to be much

wider in the backyard photo. Shown in the right column of Figure 8 are the

corresponding 3-D renderings with neutral front lighting (top) and lighting

to match the backyard photo (bottom). The yellow guidelines, of the same

width as on the left, show the same apparent widening of the chin. From these

3-D renderings, it is clear that the apparent widening of the chin is due to the

shading along the chin and jaw, and not to nefarious photo manipulation.

4. Discussion

We have described a photo forensic analysis of the historical and contro-

versial Oswald backyard photo. This analysis employed a 3-D head, body,

and scene model of our construction. This model was used to perform a quan-

titative analysis of scene geometry and lighting, each of which are shown to be

consistent and physically plausible. Previous suggestions that this photo was

manipulated or is a composite are not supported by this 3-D photo forensic

analysis.

References

[1] United States, The ocial Warren Commission report on the assassina-

tion of President John F. Kennedy, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1964.

[2] United States, Report of the select committee on assassinations of the

u.s. house of representatives (1979).

5

[3] C. McGlone, E. Mikhail, J. Bethel, R. Mullen, Manual of Photogram-

metry, 5th Edition, American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote

Sensing, 2004.

[4] R. Hartley, A. Zisserman, Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision,

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[5] V. Blanz, T. Vetter, A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces,

in: SIGGRAPH, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Los Angeles, 1999, pp.

187{194.

[6] P. Guan, A.Weiss, A. Balan, M. Black, Estimating human shape and pose

from a single image, in: International Conference on Computer Vision,

Kyoto, Japan, 2009.

[7] Y. Ostrovsky, P. Cavanagh, P. Sinha, Perceiving illumination inconsis-

tencies in scenes, Perception 34 (2005) 1301{1314.

[8] H. Farid, M. Bravo, Image forensic analyses that elude the human visual

system, in: SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, 2010.

[9] H. Farid, The Lee Harvey Oswald backyard photos: Real or fake?, Per-

ception 11 (38) (2009) 1731{1734.

6

[size=12]Figure 1: Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard.

[/SIZE]
7

[size=12]Figure 2: Mugshot of Lee Harvey Oswald used to construct a 3-D model, see also Figure 3.

Figure 3: Two views of the 3-D model of Oswald's head, see also Figure 2.

[/SIZE]
8

[size=12]Figure 4: Shown, from left to right, is the original backyard photo, our 3-D rendering, and

a superposition of the original and the outline of the rendering.

[/SIZE]
9

[size=12]Figure 5: Shown below is the original photo and the 3-D rendering. Shown above is a

magnied view of Oswald's head. Notice that the shadows on the nose, eyes, lower lip and

neck are well matched, as well as the shadow cast by the body onto the ground plane, and

the thin sliver of a shadow from the vertical post onto the ground plane.

[/SIZE]
10

[size=12]Figure 6: Shown on the left is a 3-D rendering of Oswald where the cylinder is consistent

with the size and position of the rie in the original photo, Figure 1. Shown on the right

is a rendering where Oswald and the rie are placed side-by-side and where Oswald's

articulated body was positioned upright. The yellow lines denote the measured length of

the rie and the height of Oswald.

[/SIZE]
11

[size=12]Figure 7: Shown are, from left to right, side, front, back, and side renderings of Oswald's

body.

[/SIZE]
12

[size=12]Figure 8: Shown along the top row are frontal views of Oswald with neutral front lighting.

Shown below is Oswald and the corresponding 3-D rendering from the backyard photo.

The yellow guidelines of the same width are drawn at the point in the top photos where

the chin meets the jaw line. Note that the apparent widening of the chin is due to the

shading along the chin and jaw.

[/SIZE]
13
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)

James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."

Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."

Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
Reply
#2
After reviewing the work, I conclude that the author(s) simply increased Oswald's apparent height by 12% to make the apparent length of the rifle match the Warren Commission report. It would have been more intellectually honest to keep Oswald's apparent height the same and shrink the rifle's apparent size due to some perspective effect, but that isn't the method they use.

Furthermore, the means by which they figure out the degree of height alteration (12%) isn't supported by any mathematical data or calculations of perspective and camera lens feature. To honestly make an argument for any particular level of apparent size increase due to perspective you need to know something which has never been known: At a minimum, the distance from the camera to the subject. Without that information there is no intellectually honest method to insist upon any particular degree of apparent image size. Basically the authors are just guessing that the center of Oswald's body is 11.4% further away from the camera than the rifle.

To get this level of perspective enlargement, if Oswald is holding the rifle at forearm's length (about a foot) that means that the camera is a mere 8.7 feet from Oswald.

A: One of you photo guys can surely tell us if that kind of camera could capture that photo from less than 9 feet away.

B: It certainly appears to me that the papers and the rifle are far closer to the torso than forearms length to Oswald's torso, which would shrink down the camera to subject distance accordingly.


Also, I note that their 3D head model doesn't include a cleft chin, which is visible in booking photos and even in the backyard photo. The interplay of light and shadow on the face below the jaw, especially when lit from above, cannot possibly be accurately determined when such an important facial feature has seemingly been ignored by the 3D artists.

PS They got the ears wrong too, though I don't see how that would affect the work.
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)

James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."

Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."

Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
Reply
#3
The BY photos are clearly composites, and not even particularly good ones. The heads are the same size when you overlay the poses, though the body is at different distances from the camera.
Reply
#4
Farid studied just one back yard photograph. When I asked him why he hadn't studied the others, he said he wasn't interested.
Reply
#5
Did Farid explain why he picked 12% as his body height expansion?
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)

James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."

Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."

Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
Reply
#6
No, Drew, he was very reticent in discussing the method he used. When I asked him to study the other photographs he said he didn't have time!.


I contacted him by email some three years ago.I don't know if I still have the full content of the emails, but I shall try to find them.
Reply
#7
Marina had trouble accurately describing how she took the photos. When asked to show how she took them she put the camera to her eye in order to look through the viewfinder. The camera allegedly used to take the pictures had a viewfinder you had to look down into from above. Plus the camera itself had chain of custody issues.
Reply
#8
Drew Phipps Wrote:You should go to this link and check out this 2009 work:


http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/downlo...s/tr10.pdf


[size=12]A 3-D Photo Forensic Analysis of the
Lee Harvey Oswald Backyard Photo

[/SIZE]
Hany Farid
[size=12]Department of Computer Science
6211 Sudiko Lab
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755
603.646.2761 (tel)
603.646.1672 (fax)

farid@cs.dartmouth.edu

[/SIZE]
Abstract

More than forty-five years after the assassination of U.S. President Kennedy

theories continue to circulate suggesting that the accused assassin, Lee Har-

vey Oswald, acted as part of a larger conspiracy. It has been argued, for

example, that incriminating photographs of Oswald were manipulated, and

hence evidence of a broader plot. We describe a detailed 3-D analysis of the

Oswald photos to determine if such claims of tampering are warranted.

Keywords:
Photo Forensics, 3-D Photo Analysis

1. Introduction

United States President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Novem-

ber 22nd, 1963. Shortly afterwards, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and

charged with the crime. Because he was killed before his trial many ques-

tions surrounding the assassination remained unanswered. Since this time,

numerous theories have circulated suggesting that Oswald acted as part of a

larger criminal conspiracy involving a variety of government, international,

or criminal groups. Many of these theories point to purported inconsisten-

cies in the events of November 22nd and in the evidence collected against

Oswald. One such example is a photograph of Oswald in his backyard hol-

stering a pistol and holding a rie in one hand and Marxist newspapers in

the other, Figure 1. Oswald claimed that this photo was fake
[size=12]1[/SIZE]. In addition,

many have argued that the photo is riddled with multiple inconsistencies,

including inconsistent lighting, shadows, geometry, and proportions.

The Warren Commission [1] and the House Select Committee on

Assassinations [2] investigated claims of photo tampering and concluced that

they were unwarranted. Building on this earlier work, we describe a 3-D

photo forensic examination that allows for a quantitative analysis of these

scene properties. While only applied to this historic and controversial photo,

this 3-D modeling methodology is applicable to a broad range of photo foren-

sic situations.

2. 3-D Model

Well established techniques from photogrammetry [3] and computer vi-

sion [4] are often effective in making metric measurements from photographs.

When presented with only a single image, however, these techniques face fun-

damental limitations in terms of what can be measured. A 3-D model of a

scene records a richer representation and expands the range of measurements

that can be made. To illustrate this idea, we describe the construction and

subsequent analysis of a 3-D model of the Oswald backyard photo, Figure 1.

This model is constructed from five main parts: Oswald's head, Oswald's

body, the ground plane, portions of the surrounding building, and the posi-

tion of the light source (i.e., the sun).

In [5], the authors describe a 3-D morphable model for the analysis and

synthesis of human faces. The model was derived by collecting a large set of

3-D laser scanned faces and projecting them into a lower-dimensional linear

subspace. New faces (geometry, texture/color, and expressions) are modeled

as linear combinations of the resulting low-parameter linear basis. The model

parameters can be estimated from a paired prole and frontal image or from

only a single frontal image.

We are fortunate to have access to contemporaneous prole and frontal

views of Oswald in the form of a mugshot taken shortly after his arrest,

Figure 2. These photographs provide the ideal input for constructing a 3-

D model from the commercially available implementation of [5] (FaceGen,

[size=12]1
[/SIZE]
[size=12]We focus our analysis on only one of the three backyard photos, each of which show[/SIZE]
[size=12]
Oswald in his backyard with Marxist newspapers and a rie.

[/SIZE]
2

Singular Inversions
). Two views of the resulting 3-D model (Figure 3) show

a good agreement with the original mugshot photo in Figure 2.

This 3-D head model was combined with a generic articulated 3-D body
[size=12]2[/SIZE],

and rendered in the 3-D modeling software Maya (
Autodesk).[size=12]3 [/SIZE]The ground

plane, fence, and post under the stairs were created from simple 3-D primi-

tives. The scene geometry, camera position, and direction of a distant light

source (i.e., sun) were manually positioned until they matched the original

photo.

Shown in Figure 4 is, from left to right, the original photo, our 3-D

rendering, and a superposition of the original photo and the outline of our

rendering. This gure shows a good agreement between the model and the

original photo. Note that in this 3-D model both the scene geometry and

lighting position are estimated, allowing for both a geometric and lighting

analysis, as described next.

3. 3-D Analysis

Once constructed, a 3-D model records a powerful representation for the

quantitative measurement of scene properties. In this section the 3-D model

estimated in the previous section is used to analyze the lighting, shadows,

dimensions, and geometry in the backyard photo of Oswald.

Because of the inherent ambiguity in constructing a 3-D model from a

single 2-D image, there are any of a number of 3-D geometries that would

be consistent with the 2-D image. The model constructed here and the

subsequent analysis simply show that there exists a consistent and plausible

3-D scene geometry, as opposed to a unique geometry.

3.1. Shadow

It may appear that the shadow cast by Oswald's body onto the ground,

and the shadow under his nose are inconsistent with a single light source,

Figure 1, and hence evidence of photo tampering. Specifically, the nose

appears to be illuminated from above, and the body seems to be illuminated

from Oswald's upper left. It has previously been pointed out, however, that

[size=12]2
[/SIZE]
[size=12]Alfred 1.2.0: www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/alfred[/SIZE]
[size=12]
[/SIZE]
[size=12]3
[/SIZE]
[size=12]A more detailed body was not constructed (e.g., [6]), because we were primarily in-[/SIZE]
[size=12]
terested in the shadow cast by the body, and the height of Oswald in the photo, for which

a generic body sufficed.

[/SIZE]
3

the human visual system can be quite inept at judging inconsistencies in

lighting and shadows [7, 8, 9].

With a 3-D model of the scene geometry and lighting, it is relatively easy

to compare the shadows in the original photo and rendered scene. Shown in

Figure 5 is a side-by-side comparison of the shadows. Note that the shadows

on the nose, eyes, lower lip and neck are well matched, as are the shadow

cast by the body onto the ground plane, and the thin sliver of a shadow

from the vertical post onto the ground plane. These shadows, which at rst

glance appeared inconsistent, are in fact perfectly consistent with a single

light source.

3.2. Height

The backyard photo of Oswald in Figure 1 was considered to be partic-

ularly incriminating because the rifle he was holding in the photo appeared

to be the same as that used to assassinate Kennedy. It has been suggested,

however, that the relative size of the rifle in Oswald's hand is inconsistent

with Oswald's height. Our 3-D model can be used to determine relative di-

mensions in the 3-D scene. Most importantly, the 3-D model allows us to

remove any perspective distortions that would bias the measurements made

only from the original photo.

To begin, a cylinder was added to the 3-D model to mimic the rifle,

Figure 6. Shown in the right panel of Figure 6 is a rendering of Oswald and

the rifle where Oswald's articulated body was positioned upright and the

rifle was placed in the same depth plane as Oswald's body. In this photo,

the ratio of the length of the rifle to Oswald's height is 0:

5824. Oswald was

5 feet and 9 inches tall (69 inches), which allows us to infer the rifle length
l

as:

l

69

= 0
:5824 (1)

l
= 69 0:5824 = 40:186 inches (2)

According to the Warren Commission the rifle was 40
:2 inches in length [1],

only a fraction of an inch larger than that estimated from our 3-D model.

The rifle to height ratio measured directly from the original backyard

photo is 0
:6493 which would suggest a rifle length of 44:8 inches, several

inches longer than the recovered weapon. This type of analysis is, of course,

incorrect as it does not account for the obvious perspective and pose dis-

tortions in the photo. Our 3-D model allows for the removal of all such

distortions and, in turn, to make accurate scene measurements.

4

3.3. Posture

It has been argued that Oswald is leaning so far to the left as to be

physically implausible. Our 3-D model allows for arbitrary views of Oswald's

body and measurements of his posture. Shown in Figure 7 are four renderings

of Oswald's body taken from the front, back, and left and right sides, each of

which look qualitatively reasonable. The tilt of Oswald's body was measured

to be a physically plausible five degrees from vertical.

3.4. Chin

At first glance it may appear that Oswald's chin in the backyard photo is

too wide to be consistent with his chin in other photos (e.g., his mugshot) and

hence evidence of a photo composite. Shown in the left column of Figure 8

is a photo of Oswald from his mugshot (top) and from the backyard photo

(bottom). The yellow guidelines are drawn at the point in the top photo

where the chin meets the jaw line. Note that the chin appears to be much

wider in the backyard photo. Shown in the right column of Figure 8 are the

corresponding 3-D renderings with neutral front lighting (top) and lighting

to match the backyard photo (bottom). The yellow guidelines, of the same

width as on the left, show the same apparent widening of the chin. From these

3-D renderings, it is clear that the apparent widening of the chin is due to the

shading along the chin and jaw, and not to nefarious photo manipulation.

4. Discussion

We have described a photo forensic analysis of the historical and contro-

versial Oswald backyard photo. This analysis employed a 3-D head, body,

and scene model of our construction. This model was used to perform a quan-

titative analysis of scene geometry and lighting, each of which are shown to be

consistent and physically plausible. Previous suggestions that this photo was

manipulated or is a composite are not supported by this 3-D photo forensic

analysis.

References

[1] United States, The ocial Warren Commission report on the assassina-

tion of President John F. Kennedy, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1964.

[2] United States, Report of the select committee on assassinations of the

u.s. house of representatives (1979).

5

[3] C. McGlone, E. Mikhail, J. Bethel, R. Mullen, Manual of Photogram-

metry, 5th Edition, American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote

Sensing, 2004.

[4] R. Hartley, A. Zisserman, Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision,

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[5] V. Blanz, T. Vetter, A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces,

in: SIGGRAPH, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Los Angeles, 1999, pp.

187{194.

[6] P. Guan, A.Weiss, A. Balan, M. Black, Estimating human shape and pose

from a single image, in: International Conference on Computer Vision,

Kyoto, Japan, 2009.

[7] Y. Ostrovsky, P. Cavanagh, P. Sinha, Perceiving illumination inconsis-

tencies in scenes, Perception 34 (2005) 1301{1314.

[8] H. Farid, M. Bravo, Image forensic analyses that elude the human visual

system, in: SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, 2010.

[9] H. Farid, The Lee Harvey Oswald backyard photos: Real or fake?, Per-

ception 11 (38) (2009) 1731{1734.

6

[size=12]Figure 1: Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard.

[/SIZE]
7

[size=12]Figure 2: Mugshot of Lee Harvey Oswald used to construct a 3-D model, see also Figure 3.

Figure 3: Two views of the 3-D model of Oswald's head, see also Figure 2.

[/SIZE]
8

[size=12]Figure 4: Shown, from left to right, is the original backyard photo, our 3-D rendering, and

a superposition of the original and the outline of the rendering.

[/SIZE]
9

[size=12]Figure 5: Shown below is the original photo and the 3-D rendering. Shown above is a

magnied view of Oswald's head. Notice that the shadows on the nose, eyes, lower lip and

neck are well matched, as well as the shadow cast by the body onto the ground plane, and

the thin sliver of a shadow from the vertical post onto the ground plane.

[/SIZE]
10

[size=12]Figure 6: Shown on the left is a 3-D rendering of Oswald where the cylinder is consistent

with the size and position of the rie in the original photo, Figure 1. Shown on the right

is a rendering where Oswald and the rie are placed side-by-side and where Oswald's

articulated body was positioned upright. The yellow lines denote the measured length of

the rie and the height of Oswald.

[/SIZE]
11

[size=12]Figure 7: Shown are, from left to right, side, front, back, and side renderings of Oswald's

body.

[/SIZE]
12

[size=12]Figure 8: Shown along the top row are frontal views of Oswald with neutral front lighting.

Shown below is Oswald and the corresponding 3-D rendering from the backyard photo.

The yellow guidelines of the same width are drawn at the point in the top photos where

the chin meets the jaw line. Note that the apparent widening of the chin is due to the

shading along the chin and jaw.

[/SIZE]
13

Had Oswald known the full contents of the backyard photo, he would not have committed political suicide by sending the picture to New York City.
We have a trail of evidence documenting Oswald's interest in Russian and socialism. While in the marines, Oswald's interest became almost fanatical. These events culminated in his ideological defection to the Soviet Union.Oswald's defection in 1959, coincided with the worldwide split in the communist movement. In nearly every country, communist parties splintered into mutually antagonistic groups supporting opposite sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute.

The Communist Parties of the Soviet Union did not split. Instead the majority fraction advocating peaceful coexistence conducted an intensive campaign against the minority factions that retained Leninist or Maoist positions. The Soviet leadership likened the minority factions to "Trotskyite bourgeois agents" and "infantile-leftists." Their campaign was so intense, that some leading Moscow publications called for a moderation. Nevertheless, the tone of the campaign was set.

Oswald attended many political meetings at the radio factory in Minsk. Without doubt an ideological defector would have been interested in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In any event, after two years of frequent meetings even the uninterested would have understood that peaceful coexistence meant repudiation of the revolutionary Leninist path.

We have evidence that Oswald understood this aspect of the Sino-Soviet dispute. On three separate occasions Oswald differentiated between Marxists and Leninists. When Aline Mosby asked Oswald in 1959 if he were a communist, Oswald replied "I am a Marxist." During interviews in New Orleans, they asked Oswald the same question he said I'm a Marxist. On November 24, 1963, Captain Fritz asked Oswald, "Are you a Communist?" Oswald answered, "No, I am a Marxist but I am not a Marxist Leninist."

Oswald subscribed to The Worker and The Militant during the spring of 1963. Both papers supported peaceful coexistence. The Worker advertised English language translations of the speeches of Khrushchev on peaceful existence. Editorials in The Worker denounced the Maoists as irresponsible infantile leftists.

The Militant diversified their editorial comments with criticism of Soviet bureaucracy and ridicule of the revolutionary "ultra-leftists." Occasionally, The Militant would advertise a work by Leon Trotsky.

Any reader of The Worker or The Militant would have understood the ideological inclinations of these publications. Oswald as a thirty-month resident of the Soviet Union would have understood the depth of the animosity between the Soviets and the Trotskyists.

Allegedly Oswald sent letters and the backyard photos to the Communist and the Socialist Workers Parties. These letters were friendly, polite and amiable. Obviously the author designed the letters to endear himself to the communists. The photographs on the other hand were surly, offensive, and antagonistic.

Showing someone they cannot keep their own house in order is the surest way to alienate them. This is exactly what the backyard photos did. By displaying newspapers from the descendants of the Stalinists and the Trotskyists these photographs reminded the advocates of unity of their first major division. After opening this old wound, the backyard photo poured salt into the injury. The backyard photo counterpoised two newspapers that supported peaceful coexistence with two guns that were the symbols of the revolutionary Leninist and Maoist factions.

If someone intended to produce the most inflammatory photograph then the backyard photo would have challenged their efforts. One photo taunted the advocates of unity that their fusion movement fissioned twice.

Reply
#9
My next article for CTKA will be an indepth and visual look at the BYP conflicts and why the rifle and pistol evidence is not connected to Oswald in any proveable way.

And why the BYPs are most definitely composites. Two examples below


[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=6941&stc=1]

By superimposing the image of an Oswald in the marines with the BYP we can see the shadows falling in the same line yet the nose shadows are not even close.

There are other ironclad reasons that the BYP cannot be real, one having to do with a Detective Brown and a re-creation photo.

DJ

[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=6942&stc=1]


Attached Files
.jpg   Rifle - BY versus NARA v2.jpg (Size: 121.82 KB / Downloads: 71)
.jpg   Oswald 1957 versus BYP.jpg (Size: 537.56 KB / Downloads: 70)
Once in a while you get shown the light
in the strangest of places if you look at it right.....
R. Hunter
Reply
#10
One thing we should keep in mind is that C2766 was an infantry rifle. While the basic rifle parts were manufactured the same in every M91/38 short rifle, soldiers came in all different shapes and sizes, and while one rifle stock may be perfect for one soldier, it might be too long or too short for the next soldier. For this reason, infantry rifles come with varying lengths of stocks. The 40.2 inch measurement assigned to the M91/38 would be a measurement for the most common length of rifle, made for a man of average stature, but there would be many M91/38's longer or shorter than this.
Mr. HILL. The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered with blood. There was so much blood you could not tell if there had been any other wound or not, except for the one large gaping wound in the right rear portion of the head.

Warren Commission testimony of Secret Service Agent Clinton J. Hill, 1964
Reply


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