PROJECT ENOCH
such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates. In their place was exactly what you would expect i f Witt had
never been there to begin with—the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd."
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When the attendees of this Geopolitical Conference on the Pros and Cons of Satellite Imagery saw
Katerina Witt disappear completely from successive frames of the vi deo tape, until she was
completely invisible, they were stunned into silence. How could this type of technical wizardry be
possible?
"The procedure for offing [deleting] people from a live video stream goes something like this. The first step is to align
successive video frames, using fast computational techniques that detect and reorient patterns of pixels in successive
frames. The computer stitches together the sequence of aligned frames into a mosaic that is constantly rebuilt as the
computer receives new frames. In the case of skater Katarina Witt, the mosaics store information about what is behind her
as she moves. While this is going on, fast frame-to-frame comparisons based on a Sarnoff-grown computational technique
called "pyramid processing" enable the system to isolate and track objects moving in the foreground.
"The key to pyramid processing is the succession of lower resolution versions of each frame it produces. Rather than
having to compare full sets of pixels to detect frame-to-frame differences, such as Witt moving a few inches on the ice,
the computer can rely on the reduced pixel sets. That greatly simplifies calculations, such as ones that track patterns of
pixels that travel together through sequences of frames.
"To erase Witt, the system summons the piece of the mosaic background and inserts those pixels wherever the
foreground pixel patterns change. By detecting which sets of pixels move with respect to one another and which sets
remain relatively fixed, pyramid processing computers can tr ack moving objects against stationary backgrounds. Since
these calculations are doable in less than the thirtieth of a second between frames, there's time to replace moving
foreground pixels with background pixels. Do that and you can make a skater—or anything else—vanish."
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Therefore, this unbelievably sophisticated computer program so quickly determines exactly the
foreground and immediate background images around Katerina, and then begins to fill in her image
with those matching pixels, until Katerina is suddenly gone. These calculations can be performed in
less than one-thirtieth of one second, faster than the Twinkling of An Eye. Since the calculations are
performed in less than the time it takes to go from one frame to another [one -thirtieth of a second] a
person really in a picture can disappear before their picture is ever shown. Live feeds can thus be
altered to make people disappear.
"What sets the Witt demo apart is that the technology used to "virtually delete" the skater can now be
applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers. In
the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be
edited out, and objects that aren't there can be edited in and made to look real. 'Pixel plasticity,'
Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures
from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite's electronic camera actually recorded.
This information is simply and completely mind-boggling; pictures taken by satellite and beamed to an
earth station at the speed of light may not be what we see from the live feed? "In the fraction of a
second, between video frames, ANY person ... can be edited out, and objec ts that aren't there can be
edited in and made to look real". In the "Twinkling of An Eye", all this editing in and out can be
accomplished, with very few people in the world any the wiser.
Truly, people can be made to appear and disappear in any fashion t he Hollywood producer envisions.
Certainly, people can be made to disappear; other people can be depicted arising out of coffins. The
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PROJECT ENOCH
A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AN
