You may have heard of the S-FIVE project already: it is a very interesting project proposed by the ENFSI (European Network of Forensic Science Institutes) and funded by the European Commission which aims to define guidelines for image and video enhancement in the forensic community.
From their homepage:
Introduction
Throughout the last decade, the digital video and surveillance industry has developed and expanded at an ever increasing pace. Unfortunately, the images and video recordings that are most often provided to forensic investigators are composed of rather low quality image data. Analysing such data requires considerable knowledge and tuning of different parameters in various software tools. As a consequence, forensic laboratories are most often overloaded with image and video analysis casework, and have experienced considerable difficulty in keeping up with recent developments both in terms of (academic and commercial) R&D and available software tools. Additionally, from an organizational point of view, an overview of the methods and procedures that are currently being used across the ENFSI member institutes is lacking. This hinders a unified methodology of dealing with this type of evidence and the development of standardization and quality assurance issues in general. Finally, there exists an urgent need for reference input material that can be used for evaluation and training of (new) investigators, for testing and validation of existing and new software tools, etc.
S-FIVE
This project will study various issues related to the Standardisation of Forensic Image and Video Enhancement (S-FIVE). The main focus of the project is oriented towards techniques that are used for improving the quality of surveillance video data and other types of images that portray persons and objects at the macroscopic level.
The project is proceeding at a very good pace, and after some rounds of very in-depth surveys about experts’ practices, there is now a part dedicated to the actual testing of different tools and methodologies on some common data set.
You can get the data and operational instructions here: https://www.s-five.eu/mediawiki/index.php/Collaborative_Exercise
So, why not give yourself a chance to test your skills with Amped FIVE and share your results with the community?
P.S. Amped Software will participate at the S-FIVE workshop during the week of June 15th. Save the date and let’s meet there!