Genuine, World-Class Computer Expert Evaluates Obama’s Birth Certificate PDF

Obamabirthbook.com ^ | September 26, 2012 | John Woodman

[Tex-Con-Man]

(There is a lot preceding this section, but it's mostly about previous claims and counter claims regarding the Cold Case Posse. I start where he introduces the expert.)

...

As I examined patents and technical papers written on MRC compression, one name in particular seemed to pop up again and again — that of Ricardo de Queiroz.

Ricardo de Queiroz is one of the primary fathers of this entire technology.

The very first “mixed raster content” patent in the United States was granted to Leon Bottou and Yann Andre LeCun… But the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 13th patents were granted to Ricardo de Queiroz and his team. That’s about half of the first dozen or so patents. And some of his team members and students have also gone on to further develop the technology.

In addition, Professor de Queiroz appears again and again as an author of the available technical papers on MRC compression.

Now there are certainly many other individuals who have contributed to the development of this technology; and several in particular have made really big contributions. But I decided, based on what I read in the patent filings and technical papers, that if I were going to contact one expert in the world on this particular technology, the person I would pick would be Ricardo de Queiroz.

So I contacted him. And Dr. de Queiroz was gracious enough to reply — for which I thank him. In clarifying what compression technology is capable of, he has rendered a genuine service to all who have held any interest in this controversy.

...

[Tex-Con-Man]

This is an excerpt. I will post more in a reply...

Follow the link to the entire lengthy article.

[Tex-Con-Man]

Evaluation of Obama PDF File by Professor Ricardo de Queiroz

Dear Mr. Woodman,

There is no possible way I can tell if the PDF of President Obama’s birth certificate (POBC) made available by the White House is a “forgery” or not. The forgery can happen before being processed not to mention that the paper document itself could be forged, before the scanning. Thus, this is not the point.

[Note: This is very similar to what I said in my book on the birth certificate — JW.]

The question is whether all these artifacts we see after rendering the PDF of POBC are signs of forgery. I do not see that. I see them more likely as a result of inadequate processing.

The document has poor quality and it has been aggressively processed, no questions about it. The question is whether the corruptive processing was individual with the intent of forging it, or if it was automated within regular MRC segmentation.

If it was a forgery it was a very sloppy job. Any photoshop-knowledgeable person, of the garden variety, can do a much better job than that. If it is automated, it is a lousy job too, but bear in mind that algorithms for these jobs are not trained on specific documents. They were more likely developed, trained and tested on magazine pages and books. A US birth certificate is unlikely to give good results because it may be an outlier in the big picture of all documents they had in mind when developed their MRC tool.

MRC is about separating the single-image document into multiple layers, hopefully each one with a given characteristic. This has to be done automatically, in what we call segmentation. What I see in the document are signs of MRC segmentation consistent with strategies in line with the techniques pioneered by DjVu. I (and my students) do not advocate doing the segmentation that way, but that is not the point either. In fact, I would not be surprised if the software which segmented the WH document was derived from some DjVu tool.

They first try to “lift” the text to another layer. They can find more than one type of text and place them in different layers. The rest is background and they compress with standard image compression methods.

An Illustration From a Seminal 1999 Technical Paper by Professor and Inventor Ricardo de Queiroz Shows Multiple, Different-Colored Bitmask Text Layers.

In the POBC [President Obama Birth Certificate] I see lots of signs of that. It missed a lot of text, like the R in BARACK and in many other places. The missed text is aggressively compressed with JPEG for example, which justifies the damage to those text parts.

About the halos around some text: I am not sure why they do it, but it may be trying to suppress another halo problem caused by “lifting” scanned text that leaves some of the foreground in the background and vice-versa causing trouble to compress the layers. We wrote some papers about it. You can still see background through inside some “O” letters and inside the check boxes.

There might be morphological dilation around the text mask or the segmentation is block-based. The halo could be caused by the foreground in a dilated mask, or by processing the background. One plausible alternative is that the algorithm finds text as the letters with a bit of the surrounding background for safety. Some Adobe tools do that.

Furthermore, the text is lifted to the foreground and sharpened (nearly binarized) making the background surroundings to disappear. When the text layer is pushed back onto the background plane the letter surroundings become halo. There is also some grayish lifted text, which was perhaps found to have different statistics and was then treated differently. The mask is binary, the foreground (text) can have any color or texture, or even parts of the background around the text. All these are conjectures; different algorithmic choices might produce similar results.

I took a birth certificate which has a similar background pattern, scanned and compressed using an older DjVu tool. It has shown the same problems as POBC, like text letters that were missed and sent to background, and multiple text styles. It didn’t have halo, though, because its algorithm decided to obliterate the whole background pattern. Perhaps if I had time to toy around with packages and parameters I might find something very close to what was used to generate the document shown by the WH, but I unfortunately do not have the time right now.

In summary I can only say I see much stronger signs of common MRC algorithmic processing of the image rather than some intentional manipulation.

[faucetman]

Just confusing the issue with BS. Why do changes, anomalies appear in boxes that are important and not others? The naked eye can see these obvious forged changes to the document.

This guy is making rocket science out of a scan. You don't need to be an expert to see this is an obvious forgery.

You didn't like our expert......I don't like yours!

[butterdezillion]

At this point what matters for eligibility purposes is that Alvin Onaka has confirmed to AZ SOS Ken Bennett that Obama’s HI BC is not legally valid and that the White House image is NOT “a true and accurate representation of the original record on file”. He also confirmed to KS SOS Kris Kobach that the information on the White House image is NOT “identical to” the information on the original BC.

http://butterdezillion.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/complete-klayman-letter-to-bauer.pdf

http://butterdezillion.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/wheel-of-fortune-v-family-feud-final.pdf

http://butterdezillion.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/hdoh-did-not-verify-what-kansas-requested/

[kabar]

In fact, I found the technical evidence to be overwhelming in that direction. In other words, not one of the significant birther allegations — and I examined all of them — stood up under honest and competent scrutiny.

Once the term "birther" was used, the author lost all credibility.

[American Constitutionalist]

A Genuine, World-Class Computer Expert does not make a real world experienced criminal investigator.

Don't you think that Sheriff Joe also had his own experts looking at Obama's so called birth certificate ?

[Nifster]

and while all that is very interesting the truth is nothing will come of it.

What MUST happen is for every one to work as hard as they can to make sure that O is NOT reelected.

[Revel]

I suppose that he can explain away all the other abnormalities,
And even the little date problem on the draft registration card as well.

[Windflier]

Don't you think that Sheriff Joe also had his own experts looking at Obama's so called birth certificate ?

From the article:

"...the testimony of their “experts” was not consistent (!)

Secondly, Mr. Selaty is approximately 22 years old. One might easily wonder — with no disrespect intended to Selaty, who seems to have decent enough general computer skills for someone at the beginning of a career — why, exactly, was Arpaio’s Posse relying on a 22 year old for an “expert opinion” regarding the birth certificate of the President of the United States?

Personally, if I were accusing the President of the United States of having a forged birth certificate, I would rely on real, recognized experts in the appropriate fields. And most certainly, no 22-year-olds would be in the mix."

[jasonandtheb]

Ever consider Obama does have a valid birth certificate, but put out a facsimile just to enhance the diversion?

[patriot08]

Canada Free Press nailed it long ago:

Do you fear Barack Obama?

Canada Free Press

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12999

(snip)

Every member of the Supreme Court, every member of congress, every member of the Joint Chiefs, most members of the DOD, CIA, FBI, Secret Service and state run media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, MSNBC, Fox and print news, knows that Barack Hussein Obama does NOT meet Article II – Section I constitutional requirements for the office he holds. By his own biography, there is NO way he can pass the test. The hard evidence is so far beyond overwhelming, it is ridiculous.

(snip)

But not ONE member of America’s most powerful people will dare confront Obama and his anti-American cabal on the subject. The Constitution does NOT stand.

(snip)

Half of the people you expect to stop this insanity are quiet co-conspirators in the silent coup. The other half is paralyzed by fear, motivated only by political self-preservation.

(Snip

Americans keep asking what they can do because they see that none of their leaders are doing anything to stop the demise of their beloved country. It’s the right question, because those leaders are NOT going to stop this thing.

(Snip)

Who will save freedom?

A brave few… This is how it was in the beginning, how it has always been and how it will be.

(Snip

Dr. Orly Taitz, Phil Berg and Gary kreep, all of whom have made defending the constitution and the American way of life a personal ambition in the absence of any constitutional leadership.

If the American people fail to get behind these brave few who are seeking peaceful redress, all the peaceful options will evaporate as if they never existed. We will return to a pre-1776 America overnight.

[cynwoody]

Ever consider Obama does have a valid birth certificate, but put out a facsimile just to enhance the diversion?

Good point.

The test is not whether the electronic document, per se, passes muster. Rather, it's whether the facts the electronic document asserts match what the State of Hawaii "knows". If not, forgery is an incidental artifact. If so, forgery is impossible.

Of course, what the State of Hawaii knows might not be the truth. But that's a whole other question, for which world-class computer expert credentials are irrelevant.

[Swordmaker]

This "expert" is talking about the White House and Hawaii using DjVu, an "alternative" file format for scanning and files used instead of PDF files that requires "alternative" readers and display applications, as well as alternative file manipulation application programs, that may have created the artifacting everyone has observed in the Obama birth certificate. Ask yourselves, does this scenario make any sense???? This is an obscure, very seldom used format.

DjVu has been promoted as an alternative to PDF,[citation needed] promising smaller files than PDF for most scanned documents.[4] The DjVu developers report that color magazine pages compress to 40–70 kB, black and white technical papers compress to 15–40 kB, and ancient manuscripts compress to around 100 kB; a satisfactory JPEG image typically requires 500 kB.[5] Like PDF, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer, making it easy to perform copy and paste and text search operations.

He TOTALLY ignores the mix of raster scanned image and digital text placed on the BC, mixed resolution scans, and varied rotation scans, as well the kerning found in supposed typewriter fonts. Registration problems, changing typewriter typefaces, all issues that have been identified as existing on the Obama long form BC, which are NOT issues that could be created by artifacting by DjVu layering errors and human intervention to correct said errors. Finally, DjVu could not have inserted the spurious happy face found in the the stamp ONLY on this single copy of a Hawaiian BC, or duplicated check boxes with exactly identical pixels in seven different locations. Signs of cutting and pasting to remove boxes with 'x's in them from the original template used.

[vanilla swirl]

“We will return to a pre-1776 America overnight.”

I think we are there.

[Iron Munro]

Why is it so hard for some people to accept the birth certificate as a fraud when everything else about Obama is fraudulent, lies, half-truths, cover-ups, counterfeit, pipe dreams and Unicorn gas?

If the birth certificate did turn out to be authentic it would be the only thing in Obama’s life that is.

The birth certificate doesn’t stand alone as one single questionable item in a life standing on concrete hard proven facts. Rather, it is one item of many that seems to have little substance and doesn’t quite mesh with what facts are available.

Everything about Obama is truly like visions built of smoke and mirrors. There is nothing solid, substantial, well documented and believable about the man.

It’s as if he appeared out of the clouds or was dumped off by a passing train with a good story in hand, but a story that has little substance, doesn’t quite ring true, and falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny.

[DaveA37]

Reminds me of a paid trial witness. They will say anything for money.

[JohnnyP]

In spy tradecraft this type of fake identity story is prepared for an agent and is called a “legend”.

[SeminoleCounty]

Until we see the REAL, LEGAL, OFFICIAL OBAMA HAWAII BIRTH CERTIFICATE....we do not know whether the previously released copies are frauds

However, I am way more confident with the people Sherrif Arpaio used than some pro-Obama scientist. Arpaio’s people have experience in investigation....anything pro-Obama and Science is suspect

None of this changes the fact that Obama spent millions to prevent the release of his real birth certificate before he started producing the phony ones

And, the PhonyCon Liberals need to stop attacking those who want Obama Eligibility answered. If you are not an Obama Birther by now....you are definitely an Obama Supporter

[rawcatslyentist]

Ever considered Occam's Razor?

He forged one because he doesn't have one.

[9YearLurker]

Interesting, thanks.