Hello, Tip Tuesday’s loyal friends! With all the enhancement and restoration tools featured in Amped FIVE, it can easily happen that you are undecided about which filter is better to use in a specific case, or which filter configuration is the best. This week’s Tip will show you how to visually compare the output of different chains and hopefully settle the question quickly.
Continue readingHello Amped blog readers! Following last week’s Tip Tuesday idea that “simple things matter”, today we’ll show you how one of the most straightforward filters in Amped Authenticate, that is, the Thumbnail filter, can sometimes reveal interesting information.
First of all, what is the image thumbnail? It is (well… it should be) a much lower resolution version of the image, commonly in the order of 160 x 120 pixels. It is mostly used by file/image manager applications for efficiently creating image galleries: they just need to decode a few thousand instead of millions of pixels during gallery creation and browsing, while the full-size picture will be decoded when the user “opens” it. The Exif standard provides rules for embedding the thumbnail into the image file as a stand-alone JPEG object, allowing to decode it without having to process the full-sized image.
Continue readingWe love learning about our users. We like to hear your views about the world of image and video forensics, what your challenges are, and also discovering your personal interests and hobbies. If you want to share your story, contact us for a chat!
Mario Ruiz Mateos, from the Spanish Guardia Civil, has been our user for many years and is probably our very first user in Spain. He’s a very skilled and enthusiastic user of Amped FIVE and a good friend who over the years has contributed with his ideas and feedback to the continuous improvement of the software. I’ve enjoyed his company in several training sessions and conferences in Madrid and other places… and also some nice evenings after the training sessions.
Martino Jerian, Amped Software CEO and Founder
Mario, tell us a bit about yourself. What is your background and your current role at the Criminalistic Service in the Spanish Guardia Civil?
I am the Manager of the Forensic Image Area, one of the four areas of the Engineering Department of the Criminalistic Service of the Guardia Civil. I have been performing this duty since 2013 although I have been working in the Forensic Image Area since 2003, first as an Expert and then as Technical Director. During this time, I have been drafting expert reports and technical documents related to image and video enhancement and authentication cases, answering requests made by our investigation units and testifying in courts, here in Spain and, from time to time, in some international cases.
I joined the Guardia Civil when I was seventeen, willing to help and serve, but I soon realized that if I wanted to make a real contribution I would need to study and get some training. So I graduated with a Degree in Computing Sciences and then I continued my studies to earn a Master Degree in Forensic Sciences.
What made you decide to enter the field of multimedia forensics?
When I was in my first year of University, my unit got a call from the Engineering Dept and, since the requirements were mostly knowledge on computing, I thought that it was a good opportunity to develop my career in something really interesting. At that time, I was mostly doing static surveillance, where I could not perform any technical skill.
In my first year in the Dept. I mostly trained and worked in the forensic audio field, but since the image forensic group needed reinforcement, the Manager of the Dept. finally decided that my knowledge could be valuable to boost the development in that territory.
Continue readingDear Amped Tip Tuesday fellows – welcome to this week’s Tip! Today we will show you how a very simple tool, the Reverse filter, can boost your results significantly. Ok, I can hear you say: “Oh dear, how will these Amped guys fill a Tip Tuesday with such a trivial filter?”. Keep reading and you’ll find out!
Continue readingThis week is Amped Authenticate‘s turn, and we are going to look at our images from a different perspective than usual, that is… their bytestream! We’ll see how Amped Authenticate’s Hex Viewer and Hex Strings filters can help you spot hidden information in your evidence images.
Continue readingHello, dear Tuesday Tip lovers! Hope you enjoyed your Easter eggs! But, there is still one more to open – the Amped FIVE Easter egg! Let’s see what’s inside!
Today we’re going to show you how Amped FIVE’s Snapshot functionality can speed up your work and help you reach better results.
Continue readingHello dear Amped Blog readers, welcome to this week’s Tip Tuesday. Today we’ll be dealing with one of the most sneaky kinds of fakes: recaptured images. A recaptured image is a “picture of a picture”: you display your (possibly forged) image on a screen, or you print it on paper, and then you take a picture of it. This apparently naive approach is much more clever than it seems: the obtained image will be a “camera original” image to all extents, so it will likely pass every test based on metadata/format analysis. Are we left alone against this subtle threat? Of course not, Amped Authenticate is here to help. Let’s find out how.
Continue readingHi Amped Blog readers, welcome to this week’s Tuesday Tip! Although we do our best to make you love our Amped FIVE, we are still aware that you may have better things to do in your life than enhancing videos… so, what really makes us happy is to help you get the job done in the least amount of time! That’s why this week we’ll focus on how Amped FIVE’s Motion Detection filter can save you lots of time during triage.
Continue readingApril Fools’ Day has just passed and we hope you didn’t go through any nasty trick! Alas, for people working with digital evidence, the risk of getting fooled by some ambiguous finding is always around the corner. In the case of digital image forensics, among the most frequent pitfalls, we find false positives produced by forgery localization algorithms (that is, when an algorithm marks as manipulated a region that was not so). Today’s Tuesday Tip deals with them and shows how Amped Authenticate helps you rule out some of them.
Continue readingHello Amped friends, welcome to this week’s Tip Tuesday! Today we’ll focus on a feature that is intrinsically part of Amped FIVE since always but is often overlooked by users. I’m talking about the possibility of changing parameters of a filter that lays at the beginning of a long chain while watching the effect on the final output. The “while” in the previous sentence is not incidental… it can save you lots of time and help you reach much better results! Let’s see what this is about.
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