A ghost has been seen on Google Map’s Street View!

The photo above was posted on the Daily Telegraph’s website (“Britain’s best-selling quality daily newspaper”). To read the story, visit this link to their page: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/5051309/Victorian-ghost-picked-up-by-Google-Street-View.html

The headline and story is duplicated below.

Victorian 'ghost' picked up by Google Street View
A ghostly figure dressed in Victorian clothes was filmed on Google Street View - before vanishing into thin air.

Experts have been called in to examine the Google ghoul filmed at a former Victorian docklands which has a dark and sinister past.

The woman dressed in long skirt, crisp blouse, bow tie, blue boater hat and scarf appears to be shimmering above the pavement.

She was captured by the Google Street View cameras in Tiger Bay, Cardiff - the scene of murders and unsolved mysteries going back 200 years.

The water sculpture seen in the picture is used as the gateway to enter the fictional world of Dr Who spin-off Torchwood.

Local medium Jane Cohen, 39, said: "Apparitions have often been caught on film but are invisible to the naked eye. "This woman is very smart - but she is dressed in clothes that you just don't see these days unless it's in a period drama on TV.

"But what is really strange is that she doesn't appear as a full figure - you can't see all of her."

The old docklands has been redeveloped with a theatre, waterside restaurants and plush apartments.

But local historians say the woman was filmed in the heart of the notorious Tiger Bay - once the busiest sea port in the world.

The image was filmed last June as the Google cameras filmed the streets and landmarks of the Welsh capital.

The Google cameras have also captured a spooky ET alien figure in New Jersey, United States.

When I see stories like this I usually grin and go on my merry way, but I created this blog so I could discuss ghostly photos, so I feel compelled to completely debunk this “news” story. Let’s start with the photo itself. The link to the actual Google street view picture is here (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&ie=UTF8&t=h&layer=xc&g=cardiff,+uk&ll=51.465067,-3.164636&spn=0.001123,0.002403&z=19&cbll=51.465002,-3.164463&panoid=yAIiTVUA3is84kYa2BngrQ&cbp=12,94.15319306128756,,0,5).
Here is a larger version of the photo.

The photo shows a person with a blurred-out face (Google does this now so you can’t recognize people in these photos) wearing a dark hat, a white shirt/blouse, a red bow tie/cravat, a long dark coat, and a long purple scarf. The photo is distorted below her (I’m assuming it is a female) knees.

There are several claims that are made to convince us that this is an actual ghost.

1. She is wearing “Victorian” clothes
2. She is partially transparent, not a “full figure” and “appears to be shimmering above the pavement”
3. The photo was captured in “Tiger Bay, Cardiff - the scene of murders and unsolved mysteries going back 200 years” that also has a “dark and sinister past”.

The first claims I’ll dismiss are the atmospheric comments about Tiger Bay being mysterious and sinister. All of Great Britain has a history that goes back a thousand years. Practically any corner you pick in Cardiff will have been, at one time or another, the scene of a murder or other heinous event. Local lore about haunted areas just doesn’t do much to convince me, and really are beside the point if we are just analyzing a photo.
Her clothing may be a Victorian style, or it may be a style from the 1950s, or even today. It isn’t your average jeans and T-shirt though. I think people see this kind of clothing and immediately think of Mary Poppins.

Our ghost certainly looks like Mary. The hat, white shirt, red tie, dark coat, and long skirt are a good match. Hmmm. Almost too good. According to the news story, “The old docklands has been redeveloped with a theatre, waterside restaurants and plush apartments”. I wonder what kind of theater they are talking about? Could this be an actress going out for lunch? Seems more likely than a ghost story.

I’m not a fashion guru, so I just went out on the web and did a little searching for women’s coats and found these beautiful examples.

Something like this with a smart white shirt and tie (don’t forget the hat) would look very much like our ghost woman.

If the person’s clothing is an argument for being a ghost, I don’t buy it. Today’s fashions could look every bit the Victorian style, especially in a low resolution photo.

So now let’s move on to the claim that the figure is only partially there. I went on Google Maps and found the exact location and street view photo shown in the story. I then moved around on the streets and got several other photos from different angles that show the same phantom. As you can see, she is not always a partial figure.

Same location, panned down...

Panned down even further...

Another angle....

Here's another view from down the street...

And here’s another angle. She certainly looks whole in these shots.

Ok. Ok. I know. “Ghosts can materialize and dematerialize at will”. That may be true, but lets talk about how Google gets those photos it uses for the Street View feature.

The first city covered by Street View was San Francisco, USA. Google put their own technology together to take these photos. They attached a complex camera to the top of a vehicle and drove around town, taking multiple photographs every 50 feet or so. I’m sure they used GPS technology to match a set of photos up to a specific street location. Software was then used to fuse these multiple photos into a 360 degree collage that can be viewed through your browser when you view the Street View in Google Maps. It is very ingenious the way it works.

Later on they enlisted the services of other companies to take their photos for them. (I guess it takes a long time to drive down every street in the U.S. and beyond.). I searched around the web and found this:

Dubbed the “Google Cam”, this is a camera with eleven lenses. As the car drives down the road, it takes periodic photos using all eleven lenses at once. The photo planes can be thought of as the faces of a dodecahedron (see below).

A dodecahedron has twelve sides. The one side without a lens is the facet pointing straight down, and that’s where the camera attaches to the car. Imagine a dodecahedron made of glass about 30 inches or so in diameter. The bottom facet is left open. Now, poke your head up from the bottom, and on each facet, lay a pentagonal cut out of one of your photos taken with the Google Cam – facing inwards. You can turn your head around and view a 360 degree view of the area around the Google Cam when the photos were taken. Look up and all around, you’ll see something. You will also see lines where one pentagonal facet meets another facet. It is here that the photos don’t quite match up correctly. This is where the software works to merge multiple images into a single image.

This is always hardest to do along the bottom of the image and looking straight up. The individual images are stretched quite a bit at these points, which makes any kind of seamless merge impossible. You will see this affect on all the Street View photos if you pan down and look at objects close to the camera.

The photo below was shown earlier, but now I’ve drawn in red lines where the various image planes were knitted together.

The lines show where the dodecahedron’s faces meet each other. It is quite clear by looking at the direction of the shadows for the posts that the different facets show different angles. In some cases, the angles differ by 90 degrees or more! I’ve also labeled the facets with the letters A through E. (Actually, area A is probably made up of two or three facets, but the software is able to stitch these together well enough that it is difficult to see where the facets meet).

Our woman is mostly contained in section A. At about her knees the image is broken by another facet. If we look at area E, we can see the ends of her purple scarf hanging down just to the left of where they should be to match up with the rest of the woman in section A. Section D is skewed quite a bit and it shows the ends of the scarf as well as most of her long coat to about her ankles. You would need to rotate section D counter-clockwise about 90 degrees to get it to match up to the image in section A. Her shoes are not even seen, but they would be visible in section C. They would have been right at the edge of the dodecahedron facet and were probably chopped off as the software tried to stretch and merge the images together.

This kind of weirdness is not uncommon if you look around in the Google Maps Street View. In fact, as I was maneuvering around Google Maps trying to get other photos of this mystery woman, I found this image just down the street.

Apparently, these two guys are being followed by two specters wearing jeans, and only visible from the knees down. Here are some other choice photos that people have found on Google Maps and posted for us to enjoy.

Are we to believe that there are people out there with half a head (or less) walking around on our streets? I think not. Remember to keep these things in mind when analyzing claims of spirits.

And don’t even get me started on the Google Maps alien photos…