wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Evidence in a court of Law - are "stitched" panoramas admissible?
northwest_omnipresence 2010-Nov-11 14:36:00
Years ago I was asked to provide a panorama which (without going into too much detail) would show the intersection of two hallways in a building. The photo was not allowed though, inadmissible due to the "computer enhanced" nature of the processing of the panorama.
Aside from showing the finished panorama next to the individual shots on a grid, with time stamps and other EXIF data, surely the processing of a panorama is a defensible process...
There are even single shot panoramic digital cameras:
With the Mark III Panoscan camera
http://www.panoscan.com/MK3/index.html
or with the Egg Solutions parabolic mirror
http://www.eggsolution.com/new/product/egglens.html
or with the Sony Bloggie
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalo...
and then there are the recently introduced GigaPan computer controlled stitching systems http://www.gigapansystems.com/ that obviously provide a measured and controlled method of picture taking
I find it difficult to believe this is something other folks have NOT been called upon to provide in some court some place, and if so, what grounds were used to justify the admissibility of such a panorama in a court of law?
The street level view from Google has certainly brought panoramic photography an unprecedented level of exposure and notoriety... our efforts on the WWP have also helped to increase the popularity. Panoramas have been associated with photography ever since the 1860s, when Civil War generals used panoramas to plan their battles. Cameras with lenses that "sweep" across a scene have been around since the 1870s.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?pan:4:./temp/~ammem_KRSm::
Photographs and videography have chapters written about in legal civil evidence textbooks (http://www.carswell.com/description.asp?docid=509)and yet nothing on panoramic imaging.
Is panoramic photography still some kind of "novelty" act?
--- In #removed#, "northwest_omnipresence" <northwest_omnipresence@...> wrote:
>
> Just curious if anyone has had the opportunity to be called upon to present a stitched panoramic image as evidence in any level of the legal system?
>
> Is there a defense against their use - ie: the stitching process is sequential and the stitching algorithms may miss elements from the actual scene.
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> Are there any tests or examples that can show that a stitched panoramic image need not be considered a "doctored" document?
>