Illustrator Can someone explain to me the Obama Birth Birth Certificate forgery claim?

[simonprimer]

This is a purely technical question and I am not interested in the politics at all. Please don't get angry. It is not my intention to offend.

I am open minded and want to understand the technology but some things have not been explained to me:

People who claim that it is authentic say that the different layers are caused by the OCR scanning process.

The people who claim that it is a forgery respond by saying that the OCR process could not cause links to images that are rotated 90 degrees and then scaled. They claim that this proves that the Birth Certificate was composed of different images.

Again this is a purely technical question and I am not interested in the politics at all. Could someone explain to me the links to rotated and scaled images?

 

[hawkeye]

I don't know what people claim about it being fake. If you could provide a link it would be easier to examine their claims.

As far as OCR (opitcal character recognition) . I don't see why this would even be necessary. OCR is used to convert scanned documents into text documents.

 

[simonprimer]

Originally people become suspicious of the document due to it having a lot of layers in the digital file. The people who claimed that the document was authentic said that the layering was automatically created by the OCR process when the scanning took place.

The site won't allow me to post links yet but you can search youtube for:
"

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]OCR Theory Debunked For Obama Birth Certificate! 90° Rotated Elements Found!"[/FONT]
[FONT=arial, sans-serif]That is the exact title of the video I am referring to, but it's not the only one.[/FONT]


​

 

[hawkeye]

Personally, I'm not going to take time for the birther silliness, perhaps someone else will look for the video.

I can tell you that OCR is not a scanner process. OCR programs are independent of the scanner and are used after scanning a paper document. They are supposed to optically recognize the letters of the scanned document (sometimes not too well) and transfer that data to another program for editing, such as Word.

 

[simonprimer]

Well I wish you would if you can debunk the issue, because nobody else has addressed the issue yet.

Regarding the OCR issue, that is what I meant. The document was scanned and OCR created several layers of different texts on the document. Or at least that was the explanation for the layers. This certainly makes sense, but I can't understand how the scaling and rotation would happen unless manually created.

 

[hawkeye]

OCR does not create layers.

Example: you scan a typed letter, the scanner creates a file(bitmap, jpg, whatever) of the letter. You use an OCR program to look at that file and it recognizes what the characters are, then sends that information to an word editing program. It has nothing to do with layers.

 

[Hoogle]

Yep Hawkeye is right A scanners ability to create layers is just not there yet. It struggles to seperate images half the time if you scan in multiple photos.

OCR purely recognises characters and divides them up using an algorithm which many word document editors will recognise and making the document editable.

So whoever is conspiring about the authenticity of his birth certificate needs to come up with some better evidence.

This is a photoshop discussion site and we like to keep it about photoshop, help and advice on our projects please dont side track with poitics as I know that is not what you want but the truth is your question is not really suited to this site maybe try finding an OCR forum where someone may be able to shed some light on your question.