Amped Authenticate Update 13901: Introducing Projects and Report, PRNU with Multiple Reference Cameras, Improved Social Media Identification, and More

The extra-hot summer we’ve had in Italy didn’t stop our dev team! So here we are again this week with another release, this time for Amped Authenticate, maybe just in time for you to try it before your summer holidays!

Projects and Report

We are proud to introduce this widely requested feature: you have now the ability to bookmark results, add comments, organize bookmarks in folders, and finally generate a fully-detailed Report for your case. Below is how Authenticate’s new interface will look like at the end of an image investigation:

Continue reading →

Scripta Manent: Learn How to Quickly Lay Out and Print to Paper Many Frames With Amped FIVE

Welcome, Tip Tuesday lovers! Despite being close to the year 2020, it is still quite common to meet people that refuse technology. This is especially frustrating in the judicial system, where the backlog is never-ending, and technology would surely help. Sometimes, you may be asked to provide “printed” frames of your video. Not just a couple of significant ones (that would still be reasonable): no, many of them. Will Amped FIVE ease your pain this time as well? Yes, of course. Keep reading to find out how.

Continue reading →

Amped FIVE Filter Order: It’s Better to Get it Right!

If you have attended an Amped FIVE training (if you haven’t yet, here is the list of upcoming classes), then you know how much stress we put on the “correct order of filters.” The footage you’re working with is the product of a long acquisition and processing chain, which usually introduced several artifacts. The most reasonable way to go is to compensate for these artifacts in the reverse order. If you like math, here you can find some reasons supporting this choice, which is also summarized by the drawing below. As you can see, if going from X to Z involves passing first through f and then through g, then going back from Z to X requires going through the inverse of g first, and then the inverse of f.

By Jim.belk at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2894330

If you’re more on the practical side, it’s still quite intuitive: if you first put on your socks and then your shoes, you’ll have to take off the shoes first and then the socks. In this trivial example, “take off” is the inverse function of “put on”, and it is evident that you need to take off clothes in the reverse order of how you put them on!

Continue reading →

Sharing the Smoking Gun: Did You Know Amped Authenticate’s Camera Identification Can Work With Images From Facebook?

Dear Tip Tuesday fans, welcome! This week’s Tip is dedicated to showing the power of the widely loved Amped Authenticate‘s Camera Identification filter. Based on sensor pattern noise analysis, this filter is one of the most reliable and robust in the image forensics field, where “robust” means it may still work even after the image has gone through significant processing. To demonstrate this in practice, we’ll see how the Camera Identification filter often works even on images downloaded from Facebook, which has a dramatic impact in terms of applications.

Continue reading →

Register to attend the Amped User Day in Denver, Colorado, USA

The Amped User Day is a unique opportunity to meet the team behind the Amped Software products, exchange ideas, ask questions, discuss product improvements and meet other expert Amped users from around the world. 

The Amped User Day will be held on Sunday, October 6, 2019, in the “Mile High City” of Denver, Colorado at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel, 3203 Quebec St., Denver, CO 80207.

For more info and to register, click here.

Amped Partners with the University of Colorado Denver to Help Students Analyze Image and Video Evidence Scientifically

Education is important for raising the value of video and image forensics. The more practitioners understand the correct way to process and clarify the evidence they receive, the better the probative value that evidence becomes. One group who has been working for many years to raise the quality and skill set of analysts is the National Center for Media Forensics (NCMF) at the University of Colorado Denver. In addition to participating in research and assisting with best practices for the field, they have developed curriculum at the collegiate level to educate competent forensic scientists. Through their Media Forensics Master’s program, and training courses throughout the year, they are leaders in the education of current and future examiners.

We at Amped Software are happy to be part of the NCMF’s curriculum which focuses on teaching students to look at the evidence and learn the scientific ways to examine, clarify, and authenticate images and videos. Beginning this fall, in partnership with NCMF, Amped FIVE and Amped Authenticate will be available in their classroom where students will learn how FIVE can be utilized to examine the metadata of files, understand clarification tools used throughout the world, use forensically sound stabilization and measurement tools, and create understandable presentation pieces backed by a scientific report. They will also utilize Authenticate as a way of examining image structure, composition, and metadata in order to affirm whether evidence received is valid or altered. In doing so, students will be prepared with a wide breadth of tools to get the most detail and information from images and videos as they enter the workforce.

We are very excited that NCMF has chosen our products to help in their degree program. Together, Amped and NCMF will equip students to be well-prepared analysts using “methods and technology necessary to fight crime in the digital age”.

For more information on the NCMF Graduate Program, please click here.
To learn more about Amped Software’s Academic Program, contact us.

Written in Stone: Learn How Amped FIVE Log Files Record Every Step You Took In Reaching Your Results

Dear Tip Tuesday lovers welcome to this new Tip! Today we’re digging into an Amped FIVE feature that almost no one knows: the logging system. You’ll discover that Amped FIVE keeps track of everything you do in every session, writes it to a text file, and stores it for your future needs. We’ll see how important this could be for repeatability.

Continue reading →

See you in Singapore at the Interpol World Event

INTERPOL World is a global co-creation opportunity which engages the public and private sectors in dialogue, and fosters collaboration to counter future security and policing challenges. INTERPOL World comprises of three interlinked activities:

  • 32 strategic Co-creation Labs to discuss the challenges and solutions for combating the crimes of the future
  • Exhibition that serves as a business and networking event for more than 160 manufacturers, distributors, and Research and Development organizations to offer innovative products and cutting-edge technologies
  • INTERPOL Working Groups (by invitation only) including the chief innovation officers group, artificial intelligence, drones, and the Darknet and cryptocurrency group

Visit Team Amped at booth M01 from 2-4 July at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre in Singapore, to learn why Amped products are the global leading solutions for image and video forensics.

Also remember to attend the following Amped presentations at the Interpol World Theatre found in the exhibition hall:

Amped FIVE: Forensic Image and Video Enhancement
July 3, 11:50 – 12:10

Video has become a powerful weapon in the fight against crime. It is, however, a very unstandardized and volatile media type that requires careful processing to ensure admissibility in courts. Amped FIVE is a stand-alone application to convert, interpret, analyze, bookmark, restore, enhance and output video and image evidence, all based on scientific methodologies and peer-reviewed filters. Using the software live, with real footage, this presentation will highlight the power of FIVE to the investigator, and how it enables the answering of questions and completion of tasks with unparalleled ease and speed.

Video and the Police: New Solutions to Old Problems with Amped Replay
July 4, 12:30 – 12:50

Police Officers, Investigators, Detectives and Major Investigation Teams all need to review and assess videos and images. This demo will introduce a new workflow to protect users and ensure that they can provide a forensic pathway through review, basic image enhancement and annotation, and then output to a standard format. The challenge of video within investigations will be explained through a live software demonstration on some casework.

To learn more visit: https://www.interpol-world.com/

Need to Process a Lot of Images But Time Is Short? Don’t Worry! Amped Authenticate Runs a Custom Set of Filters Offline and Caches Results For You

Hi, dear Amped blog readers, welcome to this week’s Tip Tuesday! As you surely know, Amped Authenticate is the most complete image authentication suite on the market. It has so many filters… and sometimes they could be too many! Today we’re going to see how you can save time by using Batch Processing and customizing the filter configurations.

Saving time for our users is one of Amped’s main goals. We know that every day you’re dealing with a lot of casework and investigations, so we constantly strive to make our products intuitive to use, fast, and configurable. Unfortunately, there are some things that take time by their nature, and this is especially true for some of Amped Authenticate’s Local Analysis filters. The Clones Blocks, to cite the worst case, can take several minutes to run on a single image, because it has to compute millions of descriptors and match them.

Of course, we don’t like the idea of making you sit in front of the monitor waiting for a filter to complete. That’s why Authenticate features the result caching system: once a filter is computed for an image, the result is stored and will be loaded the next time you click on the filter. This functionality works great when combined with another one, the Batch Processing (available under the Tools menu).

Continue reading →