Curiosity: Potential Anomalies (Update 01/2014)

a reply to: Aleister

I see what you mentioned and I think it should be noted, and this is very important for me, is that NASA definitely airbrushes anything that gives a hint of past activity unless it will be otherwise be easy to debunk by just attributing the item to pareidolia.
So, if it was actually a real humanoid skeleton or other critter really there, it may have been partially brushed out or brushed over enough to make it go away.
Also, and this is important too, when doing a blowup of the image, all one needs to do to see for themselves if there is data added or changed to give the anomaly substance, is to compare the original with the blowup. It can be verified if the new blow up is "giving life" to something that can't be seen in the original.

And the part about the airbrushing by NASA only comes into play if one believes they do this. I know for sure they do, but I can't prove it, so it is up to the individual to investigate that part of course.
Looking at the images you posted, I find them good possibilities for prior editing by NASA, but hard to know for sure.

I'll edit my earlier image of that metal part and try to point out the machining.
It is an assembly like a sort of strut with bolts and fasteners clamping the assembly, and on the top end there is the end of a threaded fastener. It all follows the same longitudinal alignment so it appears to be intelligently made.

Anything that would very obviously made by an intelligence is edited and anything that makes it through will be sometimes border line as to debunk-a-bility , but still..Either way it makes for good entertainment !

originally posted by: Aleister
a reply to: Char-Lee

Char-Lee! I'm actually tearing up a little, I guess this is my home thread. If you come back and start exploring I'll get back into it too. Is it time for the really good stuff yet? Some of these finds lately seem to be pointing in that direction.

:-) Thanks for making me feel so welcome, I have kept up every page. we are having the first sun of the year have been fogged in all summer so my garden is getting most of my free time. i am still looking for insects because I know that here they are the basis for much of animal life as well as the possible beginnings.

I have seen some interesting things but I am right back to realizing when blown up they are blurred even when the shot is right next to the camera you can't be sure what you are looking at....sadly. it gets pretty stressful not being able to clarify something that seems exciting to you!

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: Char-Lee
Hi there, under the rock far left in hard to see square I made:-) is that an image artifact?

It looks like one.

It looks the same without zoom but of course it is small...very.

originally posted by: Char-Lee
It looks the same without zoom but of course it is small...very.

The size is one of the things that makes me think it's a JPEG artefact, as it fits inside the 8 x 8 square JPEG compression uses.

Also, it looks like the method JPEG compression uses to mark a sharp change in colours.

a reply to: Char-Lee

you couldn't resist could you
welcome back matey



a tiny bowl of chowder to be made from it ?

funbox

originally posted by: funbox
a reply to: Char-Lee

you couldn't resist could you

welcome back matey

a tiny bowl of chowder to be made from it ?

funbox

If you add that big lobster claw in the middle it would go nicely! :-)

So it is a maybe probably JPEG artifact hum like always spinning!

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Thanks. Old skeleton was a fun one. I don't have any idea if NASA airbrushed any of the Mars pics, my personal guess would be no, but that's without knowing for sure. They'd have nothing to gain from literally covering up proof of past life on Mars. Others have pointed out on this thread when that possibility was brought up that rather than hide indications or even proof of past life NASA would announce it to the world. This would up their funding, public interest, and many other positives for the agency. I think the moon-landing doubters have mixed the kettle of soup a bit on trusting NASA, but every one of their arguments has been disproven, so it may be repetitive-suggestion ("Don't trust NASA, they faked a moon trip, so just don't trust them"), or at least a possibility of it coming from a disproven-meme. I personally dunno, just sharing another point of view

Temple doorway and statue (Sphinx?) to the left:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...



Also on same image -- screaming skull:

a reply to: Aleister

I agree NASA would have nothing to gain by covering up anything, but that goes way up past anyone there. They don't have any choice at all when they get their mandates from their military side of the bargain. This much is easy to verify for anyone who has been in the military and also had a high security clearance. When it comes to compartmented top secret issues like what I feel surrounds all of our space missions, the orders come from good ole Army Navy Air Force and Jarheads (hah couldn't resist).. And there is no one who will say anything, no one to go to and ask why, and no one will say anything except the words "Don't ask" and other more colorful metaphors. It's like a black hole and even if you make it through the black hole and come out the other side, all you will know is what your job required, so that is why there are a lot of questions for us public citizens, and not many true answers to anything.

Edit: If any of these things I marked are hard to see for anyone let me know and I will trace over what I see there. The orientation of how things are laying around can make it hard to find starting points some times , or a lot of times..
(Everything I am pointing out is intended to promote discussion and not as a statement that I think these things are there for sure. I am not sure they are, but think they might be.

I cropped out that corpse I mentioned earlier, and there are some very amazing things beside the corpse. What looks like a statue head right next to it also. I think there is definitely some matrixing as well, but I also see geometric designs and curves, and hollowed out things, carvings and check out the monkey head carving/sculpture that has head dressings like fabric design that observe what appears as intelligent design by how it seem to be made, it doesn't look random to me.

I am thinking if all this is actually in the image like a long lost ancient ruins, then it is so bizarre that it will only boggle minds and no one will believe it just because it is too insane to believe any of this is there.

Then again, maybe it is totally normal to expect that Mars was inhabited and there is no strangeness to it at all. (2 directions of thought perhaps.)

One of things I marked with an arrow looks like a hand bag or a bag with a string handle lying there and the string handle forms a very precise arc. Very interesting.

After pointing all these unbelievable things out, (how dare some ancient humanoid civilization leave all that ruins there just to confound all the humans on Planet Earth)
I am reminded how a lot of people when being told there are this crazy things to look for, respond with a natural reaction which is totally justified based on our human culture. I guess it is one of the things that make us struggle forward.

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Besides adding the arrows, did you make any processing of the image? It looks like there was some processing added, as the JPEG artefacts appear changed.

Also, could you post that photo ID or a link to the original? Thanks in advance.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Besides adding the arrows, did you make any processing of the image? It looks like there was some processing added, as the JPEG artefacts appear changed.

Also, could you post that photo ID or a link to the original? Thanks in advance.

Greeting Armap!
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...
That is the original, I am pretty bad sometimes remembering to put those links in, it is almost as bad as sending important e-mail with attached docs, and then forgetting to attach fil

I should have also mentioned that I did in fact blow up the image using a program called "Image Analyzer" and it has 8 different choices to use for resizing including just "pixel resize" which doesn't do anything except make it bigger/smaller of course, but I didn't use that one.
here is the above corpse from the original which I cropped and then resized it larger using only "pixel resize" and it looks terrible.

The one I uploaded that you asked about because it looks changed and definitely is used the "Wiener filter M=4" which the program auto selected when I clicked on the resize operation.

I don't know enough yet about the accuracy of this filter so I have no way of judging if it added bogus data or took away good data, but some of these new algorithms are supposed to be mathematically precise. But still left not knowing for sure 1 way or the other.
It is amazing what using that filter revealed in the image, but I really want to ask the author of this filter, I guess a "Mr. or Miss Wiener? hehe, I'll seriously try to contact them and toss a few questions about what the filter does, or I could just read up on it in the program's help menu.. Take a look at another blow up and check out how the "Boot looking item has a leg bone with a knee hinge going into the dang boot.!. Hard to believe seeing all these things even if the corpse head wasn't really there, a lot of related things there.


I didn't do any other processes except an auto color on the earliest corpse blowup, however, I see that it did some slight noise reduction and sharpness increased a little bit.
Other programs I have used to make blowups before I discovered "image analyzer" totally added swirls and crud no matter how I set the settings, and none of them had the "wiener filter M-4 , M-6 .

So far, I like this little program because it has some really sophisticated features and operations. How much it can be trusted in giving a true visualization of the low res pixelated originals I do not know. Hopefully I can find out. Image Analyzer web site

originally posted by: NoCorruptionAllowed
I should have also mentioned that I did in fact blow up the image using a program called "Image Analyzer" and it has 8 different choices to use for resizing including just "pixel resize" which doesn't do anything except make it bigger/smaller of course, but I didn't use that one.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

Pixel resize is the only true resizing, all other methods use resampling, in which pixel values are created according to some algorithm, and those names you see are the names of the different methods of creating the pixels, the easiest (and the one that looks worse) being averaging, in which the pixels are resized and then averaged to try to create a natural look. The more sophisticated methods try to recreated the look of the original without too much changes to the original pixels, but there's always change.

In cases like this, where the resampling is applied to an image with a strong JPEG compression and many visible compression artefacts, the resampling method gets "confused" by the artefacts and tries to create an image that never existed, as the JPEG compression uses several tricks to help us see an approximation of the original image with a much small file size, so, among other things, it reduces the number of colours and uses complementary colours to force us to see sharp changes in colour.

It will download that program and try to show the difference between the pixel size and the "wiener filter".

This is the "corpse", resized with "pixel size" to 400%.



Now with the "Wiener filter, M=4".



And this is the difference between the two images, with some gamma correction to make it more visible.



As you can see, the edges are the areas that are the most affected, as the algorithm tries to create a "nice" version of the resized image.

From what I have seen in all the years I have been looking (and studying) digital images, almost all (or even all) resampling algorithms make the edges look "rounder", as they "round" the square edges of the resized pixels. That's why I don't trust resampling and never use it in cases like this.

a reply to: ArMaP

Awesome on doing all that Armap

The image containing the "difference" is very recognizable seeing all those curve's (I'm like, "whoa, I just had a Déjà vu!")

The main large overall "shape" in the difference image actually looks like a coffin! Wide at the top and then getting narrower from about the waist line on down.

I remember doing the wiener filter the first time and noticed the new curvy's in all the fine detail throughout the entire image. Do you feel this filter is modifying the image enough to devalue all suspect or targeted anomalies? If the filter was showing us a true fix of a low resolution original, then one would think that the entire scientific community would be tying up all the phone lines at NASA about that..

Until there is a majority consensus on that, makes it pretty problematic to present these things in a serious manner most of the time. Perhaps just imagining that it "might be real" is what captures the interest of folks, myself included.

originally posted by: NoCorruptionAllowed
Do you feel this filter is modifying the image enough to devalue all suspect or targeted anomalies?

I do, that's why I never trust resampled images and, from what I have seen, NASA (or other organisations, like the USGS) rarely use it.

a reply to: ArMaP

I feel that trying to bolster a noted anomaly by using a blowup filter isn't a sound method either. Having said that, if the anomaly can be seen clearly enough in the original image anyway, then why have a blowup? To think that a blowup filter is automatically going to give the anomaly more credence doesn't make sense to me either, as I have never used a blowup filter and then found what I thought was an anomaly, become something mundane after all.

In other words, if the anomaly in question looks like a piano in the low res image, then a blow up shouldn't be needed anyways. But I have never seen an enhancement end up disproving an anomaly in the other situation, it always seems to make it appear even more real for some reason. To me, this means that using the filter isn't really as bad as some of the arguments against their use, because they haven't really changed anything enough to corroborate either for or against.

My meaning isn't to promote support for questionable methods of image enhancement, but rather to point out these other oddities that are never explained very well. And to also say that I have never really seen any proof that enhancement shows anything substantial, that wasn't already there before, just a bit more pixilated looking before the filter.

I'm looking forward to seeing more new images from the rovers either way because landscape imaging is my favorite kind of photography, and there is definitely a lot of interesting vistas on Mars that these rovers may never make it to, but perhaps new upcoming Mars missions may touch down in vastly different areas in the future, then we can see what that holds..

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Hi NCA and welcome to this thread (belatedly) ... I agree with you that the particular feature or anomaly should indeed be visible in the unenhanced image. No enhancement whatsoever will add any detail that's not already part of the original image(s).

But then again, I also sometimes like to include images that are slightly blown up (ideally using pixel resize) just to have a bigger version of the feature on the screen (alongside the original image). And when using filters, I think it's fair to mention what kind of filters have been applied (just as you did in your previous posts).

So welcome again and I'm very much looking forward to all your threads, posts and discoveries (because every pair of eyeballs counts when it comes to scanning the huge image archives provided by Curiosity)!

Check out the OP in this thread www.abovetopsecret.com... for a link to a Huffington Post page which shows pictures of rocks on Mars that look like things. They call Arken's Hugo a 'door handle'. No credit of course. And they use Arken's flower too. I'll get the exact post to the story in a minute. Here tis:

www.huffingtonpost.com...

Melted rock:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...


Hermit crab:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...


Circular:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

Come on. Clearly a barnacle:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov...