We have lots to say at LEVA 2020

Team Amped has a lot to say at this year’s LEVA Annual Digital Multimedia Evidence Training Symposium.

Join us for one or all of these very exciting and interesting Amped Software sessions at VirtuaLEVA 2020 from October 26-30.

This online series of training events will be delivered via Zoom Pro and recorded sessions will be available until April 1, 2021. All session hours can be applied to LEVA certification renewal including the recorded sessions.

“See” you there!

Dealing with Deep Fakes
Presenter: Marco Fontani
October 26, 13:15 – 15:15, EDT

This presentation provides a basic understanding of what to look for in terms of image authentication and what can be utilized in the field of video authentication. Understand what is a Deep Fake. What are steps to authenticate images. How is video authentication different from image authentication.

Advanced File Analysis and Interpretation
Presenter: David Spreadborough
October 27, 10:45 – 12:45, EDT

Take an in-depth look at some of the information held within a video file and how it is interpreted. Look at stream timing, format differences and the old favorite of encoding reliability. What are the facts, what’s unreliable… and what requires further testing? Amped FIVE is featured to decode, convert, analyze and interpret the video evidence, but non-FIVE users will easily be able to follow on and gain valuable insight.

Trends In the Evolving Field of Forensic Video Analysis
Presenter: Blake Sawyer
October 27, 15:30 – 17:00, EDT

Based on data collected over the years of supporting the Forensic Video Analysis community, learn how trends in the FVA field are changing. The goal of this presentation is to examine those trends and volume to help agencies evaluate their needs in terms of systems and workflow.

FFmpeg Fundamentals
Presenter: Blake Sawyer
October 28, 10:45 – 12:45, EDT

This presentation will walk through the fundamentals of FFmpeg as described in the SWGDE document, with an emphasis with streamcopying proprietary file, and using some of the analysis features from the command line. Learn and understand some of the limitations of FFmpeg, but also many of the benefits for the daily toolbox and troubleshooting workflow.

Amped FIVE Workflow
Presenter: Blake Sawyer
October 28, 13:15 – 17:15, EDT

Get an understanding on how Amped FIVE can be the one tool for playing, converting, clarifying, and presenting video evidence. The focus of this course will be some of the newer features Amped has released in the last few years, but should be well suited for new and experienced users.

FFmpeg Fundamentals (repeat)
Presenter: Blake Sawyer
October 29, 15:30 – 17:30, EDT

This presentation will walk through the fundamentals of FFmpeg as described in the SWGDE document, with an emphasis with streamcopying proprietary file, and using some of the analysis features from the command line. Learn and understand some of the limitations of FFmpeg, but also many of the benefits for the daily toolbox and troubleshooting workflow.

Dealing with Deep Fakes (repeat)
Presenter: Marco Fontani
October 30, 09:00 – 10:30, EDT

This presentation provides a basic understanding of what to look for in terms of image authentication and what can be utilized in the field of video authentication. Understand what is a Deep Fake. What are steps to authenticate images. How is video authentication different from image authentication.

Advanced File Analysis and Interpretation
Presenter: David Spreadborough
October 30, 10:45 – 12:15, EDT

Take an in-depth look at some of the information held within a video file and how it is interpreted. Look at stream timing, format differences and the old favorite of encoding reliability. What are the facts, what’s unreliable… and what requires further testing? Amped FIVE is featured to decode, convert, analyze and interpret the video evidence, but non-FIVE users will easily be able to follow on and gain valuable insight.

REGISTER AT LEVA WEBSITE

Join us this week at the IACP Virtual Training Event and Expo

From October 21 – 23, Amped Software will be exhibiting at the IACP 2020 Virtual Training Event and Expo. 

Video evidence is becoming a crucial component of cases and official investigations, and two things have become ever apparent. First, it is crucial that agencies review these videos accurately to make sure they get the best evidence. Second, agencies need a fast and easy way to get relevant information out to the public or other agencies.

We are excited to be able to share with the attendees at IACP 2020 the tools we have, which are helping agencies worldwide, to convert and play video accurately from any source without the need for other applications, and to generate actionable images and videos with annotations and redactions.

Come and see more at the Amped Software “booth” in the virtual expo hall. Remember that the hall will be open a full day before programming so you have lots of time to come see us! Schedule meetings or “drop a business card” to interact with us once the platform is available. 

While you can explore the expo hall anytime, company representatives will be available from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22. 

See you there! 

REGISTER TODAY
Amped Replay

Make Impressive Annotations in Seconds with Amped Replay’s Assisted Tracking

Dear Amped friends welcome to this week’s Tip! We hope you’ve already heard of the latest Amped Replay update, which rolled out a few weeks ago. One of the coolest new features is assisted tracking, which makes annotations in Amped Replay even more powerful and easy than they were before. This weeks’ tip comes directly from one of our developers: it helps to make assisted tracking work better in challenging situations, so don’t miss it and keep reading!

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Handle With Care: Edit Project Files With a Text Editor

Dear friends welcome to this week’s tip! Today we’ll talk about something that is more of a philosophy than a feature, and as such, you’ll find it reflected in all Amped products. We’re talking about the way Amped solutions deal with export formats and project files. We’ll show you how compatible our export formats are and how readable (and… editable!) our project files are, so… keep reading!

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How to Use Amped Authenticate to Reveal Traces of Former JPEG Compression in Seemingly Uncompressed Images

Dear Amped friends, welcome to one more tip! Following the recent mini-series about unveiling traces of double JPEG compression, today we’ll show how Amped Authenticate can reveal if a seemingly uncompressed image was actually JPEG compressed in its past. Keep reading to find out more!

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Is PRNU Camera Identification Still Reliable? Tests on Modern Smartphones Show We May Need a New Strategy!

Dear Amped friends, today we’re sharing with you something big. If you’ve been following us, then you know that Amped invests lots of resources into research and testing. We also join forces with several universities to be on the cutting edge of image and video forensics. During one of these research ventures with the University of Florence (Italy), we discovered something important regarding PRNU-based source camera identification.

PRNU-based source camera identification has been, for years, considered one of the most reliable image forensics technologies: given a suitable number of images from a camera, you can use them to estimate the sensor’s characteristic noise (we call it Camera Reference Pattern, CRP). Then, you can compare the CRP against a questioned image to understand whether it was captured by that specific exemplar. You can read more about PRNU here.

Since its beginnings, the real strength of PRNU-based source camera identification was that false positives were extremely rare, as shown in widely acknowledged scientific papers. The uniqueness of the sensor fingerprint was so strong that researchers were even able to cluster images based on their source device, comparing the residual noise extracted from single images, in a one-vs-one fashion. We tested this one-vs-one approach over the VISION dataset, which is composed of images captured with 35 portable devices (released roughly between 2010 and 2015), and actually, it worked. Take a look at the boxplot below. On the X-axis you have the 35 different devices in the VISION dataset (click here to see the list). For each device, the vertical green box shows the PCE values obtained comparing couples of images captured by the device itself (the thick box covers values from the 25th to the 75th percentiles, the circled black dot is the median value, isolated circles are “outlier” values). Red boxes and circles represent the PCE values obtained comparing images of the device against images of other devices. As expected, for most devices the green boxes lay well above the dashed horizontal line sitting on 60, which is the PCE threshold commonly used to claim a positive match. Most noticeably, we have no red circles staying well above the PCE threshold: yes, there are some here and there sporadically, but they’re still at values below 100, so we can call these “weak false positives”.

But with all the computations that happen inside modern devices, is PRNU still equally reliable? To answer this question, we’ve been downloading thousands of images from the web, filtering them so to take only pictures captured with recent (2019+) smartphones. We also filtered out images having traces of editing software in their metadata, and we applied several heuristic rules to exclude images that seemed to be not camera originals. For some devices, we also collected images at two of the default resolutions. We then grouped images by uploading users, assuming that different users take pictures with different exemplars and that a single user only owns one exemplar. Now, take a look at what happened when we tested Samsung smartphones.

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Amped Replay Update 18163: Introducing Assisted Tracking for Automatic Spotlighting and Redaction, Plus More Supported Video Formats

Hello Amped friends, we are back with another huge feature-packed update to our DVR/CCTV converter and player, Amped Replay. We continue to listen to our users when developing our software and today we bring to you one of the most sought after features – automatic tracking for all annotations, from spotlighting to redaction, to the many other tools available in Amped Replay.

In this post we will also delve deeper into Replay, looking under the hood at the powerful Amped conversion engine which continues to drive investigations worldwide.

Assisted Tracking

Since its launch, Replay has allowed the user to easily track annotations, simply moving the selection while playing the video would record all the movements. This mode is still available but is now complemented with our new assisted tracking option that allows users to annotate their media in an even simpler and more intuitive way than ever before.

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