Planet Four Talk

Seeing is believing?

  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster

    I have noticed, that there are a lot of people out there (including myself) that are misinterpreting what they see within an image. It is not really a problem for the scientists however, as they tend to base their facts on measurements and other raw data.

    To most of us, sticky out veins on an image must mean some kind of ridge, right... wrong! Scientists know these to be channels, so why are they displaying as veins? Well, it is either a trick of the light, or that the images are upside down (maybe a bit of both)?. Anyway rotating an image through 180 degrees will help (for a while at least) to correct the lighting, with a better chance to see what is actually going on. I have some examples here (scroll down to Mars mission)... http://the-orangery.weebly.com/

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  • Ian_Mason by Ian_Mason

    Hey Jelly, I get what you are saying, but I think scale is the thing that confused me the most to begin with. I thought they were say 1-2 mile across as opposed to only 100-200 metres across.

    With regards to,

    To most of us, sticky out veins on an image must mean some kind of
    ridge, right... wrong! Scientists know these to be channels, so why
    are they displaying as veins? Well, it is either a trick of the light,
    or that the images are upside down (maybe a bit of both)?.

    well inverting the images does nothing for me, but I do agree with what the scientists say, that in many cases ridges are actually channels, but with images like the one below, I am still convinced these are ridges. Might the images have been reversed?

    enter image description here

    Posted

  • Hakaeh by Hakaeh

    Don't think about where the light comes from and you will be able to see either! Just look at the image for a while, look away, maybe try a few times. Once you saw the negative, you will be able to see it again. Promise.

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  • barriemac by barriemac in response to Hakaeh's comment.

    I'm still not convinced - I had an inverted negative of the above but there is no paste option for posting.
    The negative image certainly comes over as channels but I still see ridges in the original The shadows seem to add to the impression especially where shadows are lengthened by higher features. I could still be wrong

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  • Wounded_Knee by Wounded_Knee

    When staring at it think, sun from the bottom right an grand canyon, once you can convince the eye they are channels they will jump out at you....well jump in at you 😃.......edit...just noticed there is a boulder, bottom of picture and right, notice how its right side is light with shadow left,confirms sun is lower right.

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  • MarsGazer by MarsGazer

    The 'big' features are ridges, but there are stream like features in the valley in the bottom, at the right side of the left side (cut above pic in 2 sides, top-to-bottom; then look at the left piece and the right side of it, you can see these lines running)

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  • Portyankina by Portyankina scientist

    Hi!
    All the features on the image above are channels. Sun is from lower right, Wounded Knee is right with this. I am very sorry, that you can not see them the right way, very often I don't see them myself. But i know, that the trick lies inside my own brain. The brain is an amazing machine for the fast feature recognition. It is very useful in everyday life: we need to fast react to the objects around us. To become efficient, brain developed "fast tracks" that are right and useful in most situations and help making microsecond-decisions. One of them is finding faces in everything around: leaves, clouds, martian landscape. It is helpful for human to recognize another human fast. That's why people keep finding faces on Mars. Another hard-wired fact for our brain is that light comes from above. You must agree, most of time it does. So, to decide if the thing is concave or convex our brain assumes that light is from top (and somehow top-left for most people, but not 100% of people). This is why it is so hard to see spider troughs as channels. But you can train, because the brain is quite trainable. Btw this why also if you insist on not believe, you train your brain more and more to see channels as ridges... Some people are easier adaptable than others to this, as for any other abilities.

    Another comment: There is no "right way" for these images and none of them were reversed.
    You can imagine Mars as a globe and spacecraft that flies around it in almost polar orbit, i.e. it goes from North to South, flies above pole and flies from South to North on the other side of Mars. And repeats all again. The image of the southern polar areas, that the spacecraft will take on the descending branch (from North to South) of the orbit will have sun coming from below, because sun comes from the equatorial area, same as on Earth. We do not rotate our camera relative to the spacecraft, we only can rotate/tilt the spacecraft as a whole. If we take image on ascending branch (moving from South to North), sun will come from the image top.
    Now, one side of Mars has day, another one is in the darkness of the night and we can not image there. This means, we mostly get one of those branches for imaging. It depends on the exact orbit parameters, which one.
    As a result, most of images you have got to see have sun from lower side - the most problematic position for our brain to judge the geometry, but it is not always-always true.

    I hope, I manage to explain some of those troubles to at least some interested people.

    Anya

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  • Ian_Mason by Ian_Mason in response to Portyankina's comment.

    I am really struggling to see these as channels, but yes, I can see yours (Anya) & 'Wounded Knee's' logic to this, having previously seen the BBC QI footage below, which supports what you say Anya about the brain being an amazing machine for the fast feature recognition, such as picking up on faces, & how light distorts the truth.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORoTCBrCKIQ

    I hope this converts others also, & many thanks.

    Ian.

    Respond

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  • DannyU by DannyU

    There may be no 'right way' for the images but there is an optimal way of viewing them (without training your brain). The images linked to by JellyMonster are good examples of how flipping the image enables you to see it differently.

    The image posted by Ian Mason - I can't see that as channels either, regardless of orientation - but the brain uses a lot of different cues in a complex image to interpret what we are seeing.

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  • pocketmoon by pocketmoon

    Hey Scientists 😃 How about a quick javascript update to the website to rotate all images 180 degrees?

    Jelly monster just opened my eyes! Everything I thought was a peak is in fact a trough !

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster

    There may be no 'right way' for the images but there is an optimal way of viewing them (without training your brain). The images linked to by JellyMonster are good examples of how flipping the image enables you to see it differently.

    DannyU, I couldn't have put it better myself.

    Hey Scientists 😃 How about a quick javascript update to the website to rotate all images 180 degrees?

    I've been told it will mess up their investigations... maybe next time?

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  • Portyankina by Portyankina scientist

    Hi again!

    I've put my comment from this discussion into the post in our blog.

    Scientists have few to do with the web-page interface, you have to ask our engineers!

    Anya

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  • AUricle by AUricle

    Hokey-Smoke Bullwinkle!
    No matter how I try, I can't see these as channels. Yet I clearly saw the difference on the "orangey-weebly" page....at least for awhile. Then suddenly, it didn't matter which frame i looked at. The channels were gone.
    Even downloading them and re-orienting them doesn't seem to work.....especially once your brain has "made up it's mind"!....lol.

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster

    It’s unlucky, that we got the most problematic sun position for our project.

    Well it's not that bad as I can invert them mysefl.

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  • Hakaeh by Hakaeh

    Image APF00002wc

    how about this image, I suppose these bubbles are then dents?

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  • jules by jules

    Having been involved with Moon Zoo for a few years has certainly helped here. It took a good while to get my eye in to see positive and negative features correctly even though all the images on Moon Zoo are orientated so that they are illuminated from the left. As for images like the one above I find turning the screen upside down (Netbook and laptop users only!) works every time and the landscape is transformed when you see these as cracks / channels. The brain "prefers" to see light from the left.

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster in response to Hakaeh's comment.

    Hang on, I'll just rotate it... dents!

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster in response to jules's comment.

    I have been saying this all along. Scientists, engineers and technicians know this but didn't feel the need to change their orientation. This means we have to rotate the images ourselves, if we want to see what they really look like. Having said that, some images look pretty good the wrong way round. Great site also... so not all bad!

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  • Ian_Mason by Ian_Mason in response to jules's comment.

    I am still struggling to see ridges as channels. Might being left handed be a further problem perhaps???

    I need a screen that I can turn around, as opposed to inverting, lol

    😃

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  • jules by jules in response to JellyMonster's comment.

    Then again Moon Zoo is all about identifying craters and mounds so the need for "correctly lit" images is paramount. Maybe if distinguishing between channels and ridges becomes a future Planet Four task then the images will be rotated. I do find myself trying to see the "real" landscape though - it annoys me when I can't get it!

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster in response to Ian Mason's comment.

    Try these (scroll down to Mars mission)... http://the-orangery.weebly.com/ The first image should be obvious, otherwise there is no hope 😃

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  • Wounded_Knee by Wounded_Knee

    I find tilting my head can help on the tricky ones.

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  • jules by jules in response to Ian Mason's comment.

    Short of standing on your head, I have run out of ideas! Frustrating isn't it? :\

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Just wanted to jump in here and echo what other members from the science team have mentioned elsewhere Adding a rotate button would actually hurt our statistics because we'd have to account for the fact that some people used the rotate button and others didn't. Having a uniform sample of images helps us more when we combine the multiple classifications together. More than one person looks at each image. We will combine the results together to identify where the fans are. This is because combining the result of many non-experts can equal or even best an expert opinion. This is known as the Wisdom of the Crowd effect. So adding the ability to rotate the image changes the experience from volunteer to volunteer. I'm sure when we use map projected images we'll show the sun angle and orient differently when we focus on the spider terrain, but since we're focusing on the fans and blotches right now the image orientation in respect to the Sun is not important.

    Also it depends on the person, rotating the image for me didn't make the channels look like depressions in any orientation. So for the science we need right now, we're not going to add a rotate button. I can understand the frustration. Perhaps we can add a rotate button on Talk or also link to map projected images on Talk.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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  • Ian_Mason by Ian_Mason in response to JellyMonster's comment.

    Woohoooo..........I did it! 😃

    It has only worked for me on the pair of images on the very bottom of that page, but it is a start I guess.

    Many thanks.

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  • Axewarrior by Axewarrior

    How about ridges tracing the sides of channels?

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  • AUricle by AUricle

    I'm going to ignore this for now.
    Identifying 'fans' or 'blotches' really is not dependent on correctly 'seeing' channels or ridges.
    One thing I don't understand is........on Lunar images, I have NO problem identifying rills,craters, ridges, or mountains. What's wrong with my brain? 😃

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  • Wounded_Knee by Wounded_Knee

    I would hazard a guess its something to do with the illumination, on the moon the light source is obvious and there is a high contrast between light an shadow, so the brains urge to see the illumination coming from the top left is overwhelmed by the evidence presented by the eye, on mars the contrast is low and the features subtle so the brain (unless persuaded) does its default action and see`s light from the top left.

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  • Wounded_Knee by Wounded_Knee

    Just had a thought why the brain favours top left illumination, around 90% of the population is right handed and for many thousands of years the only light source would be the Sun or a fire, so if you were working on something like making arrows you would position yourself with the light source in front of you also you would make the light source be slightly to the left to avoid shadows from your right arm, many thousands years of this and your born with the hardwired light source top left/ forward left quirk.

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster in response to Wounded Knee's comment.

    I like this theory, as it fits my estimation of a 90/10 split for people in favour of inverting the images.

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster in response to AUricle's comment.

    on Lunar images, I have NO problem identifying rills,craters, ridges, or mountains. What's wrong with my brain?

    Nothing. If you invert the the lunar images you will see mounds or such like... try it and see! Unfortunately, the sun direction in the images from Mars are different.

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  • Ian_Mason by Ian_Mason in response to AUricle's comment.

    I have found Jelly`s idea of inverting images a help on 'dry' images, but no help when images have channels which are coated in a layer of ice/transparent ice.

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  • Paul_Johnson by Paul_Johnson

    Ian, try spinnig it 180, then adding a bit more angle to it and staring in one corner. I swear to God that works for me, its a revelation when it happens...!

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  • JellyMonster by JellyMonster

    I think they should have supplied us with special 3D glasses 😃

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