At year’s end, Martino Jerian, CEO and Founder of Amped Software, looks beyond features and release notes to explain what Amped Software is really building. From forensic tools and training to research, community, and policymaker outreach, this post connects our daily work to a single mission: justice through science. It’s about reducing unsolved crimes, preventing wrongful convictions, and why people remain our foundation.
It’s the busiest time of the year. You are wrapping up all the numbers, trying to gather your thoughts on the past year, and planning for the next one. At the same time, you need to be present for many family commitments and go on last-minute gift-hunting expeditions.
I usually take the opportunity to reflect on and share our main accomplishments for the year. As I did, for example, in 2023 and with a more personal twist in 2024.
This time, I wanted to do something different. I want to tell you why we are here and why the fact that we develop forensic software is not the ultimate goal of what we do, but rather the foundation. This article is based on a presentation I gave at Amped Connect US and Amped Connect Italia, our in-person events (spoiler: we recently announced the date for Amped Connect US 2026, pre-register while there’s still space!).
Why Are We Here?
More than 50% of crimes remain unsolved globally.
Digital media is the most common and powerful form of evidence, yet it is often mishandled or not used to its full potential.
Our mission is to help crush the number of unsolved crimes and prevent wrongful convictions through the proper use of multimedia evidence.
From this derives our well-known motto “Justice through science”.
Everything we do, from product development to support, from research to marketing, has this as its ultimate goal. Help crush unsolved crimes AND prevent wrongful convictions. We focus equally on security AND justice. We don’t just want crimes to be solved; we want them to be solved right.
Our Foundations: the Software
Our software is at the core of what we do. Covering everything that we do and that we have done is beyond the scope of this article. However, this year has been exceptionally impactful regarding our product releases. So I’ll mention just the main accomplishments of the hundreds of new features, enhancements, and bug corrections we have released over this year:
- In Amped FIVE we added Multistream Video Loading, the CTU filter (like Macroblocks but for H.265/HEVC), Writing Queue, Camera Calibration, RIFF Viewer, and Filter Presets.
- In Amped Authenticate we added the RIFF viewer, the CTU filter, the Perspective filter, and improved deepfake detection with batch processing.
- In Amped Replay we added completely new Motion Detection (also with multiple regions of interest), a new Report format, and Assisted Redaction for quickly finding and redacting persons, heads, vehicles, and license plates.
- In Amped Engine, the conversion system behind Amped DVRConv, our other products, and many third-party DEMS on the market, we added 20 new video formats, countless variants of already known formats, and support for audio-only files.
- In Amped DeepPlate we added 5 new countries supported, for a total of 15 countries and 420 different types of license plates.
Your Foundations: Training and Certification
Having the best tools is not very useful if you don’t know how to use them. For this reason, we offer eight different training classes targeted at different products, users, or applications. Our training is not what someone likes to call “buttonology” (just learning what buttons to push in a software), but a thorough education on the workflow, the best forensic practices, and the basic scientific concepts behind many of the software features.
While many analysts may be able to use a significant portion of the products without our specific training, even the highest experts told us they learned many new things during the classes and found themselves more prepared for testifying in court. We offer both online and in-person classes. And once you feel confident with the use of Amped FIVE and have a solid understanding of the fundamentals, you can apply for our certification.
This year, we trained more than 800 users for a total of more than 5300 users trained over the years!
Research to Advance the State of the Art
As I told you in the opening, software and its training are the core of what we do. But we realized that we needed to have even more impact to move closer to our goals. To achieve that, we started doing many more things.
Digital media forensics is a rapidly evolving field; just consider the incredible advancements in AI-generated media over the past couple of years. We are at the crossroads between technology and law. Often, we find ourselves studying the most recent literature on these topics, but also needing to push the state of the art ourselves or in cooperation with various universities. When we do, we gladly publish the results to give back to the forensic community.
To give you an example, this is what we did in the past 5 years:
- We cooperated with 8 different universities (with faculties such as engineering, mathematics, forensic sciences, and law), with 20 master’s theses and internships
- We financed 2 PhDs and 1 research grant
- We published 10 scientific papers
As an example, this is the latest paper we published this year: “Detection of Double Compression in HEVC Videos Containing B-Frames“.
Creating a Community
People working in forensics need to exchange ideas and experiences. Especially for those working in the multimedia side, there are not many places to network, or they are limited to some geographical regions.
Often, during training, we had people asking if we had a virtual platform where they could stay in touch with other users. They would often exchange phone numbers or create WhatsApp groups that lasted for years. So, a couple of years ago, we launched a community on Discord that now has almost 800 users! Very interesting discussions happen over there: I like to think that even this small thing helped our pursuit of crime reduction.
But there are countless other resources. The vast majority of technical questions can be solved by searching the more than 700 articles on our blog or the almost 300 videos on our YouTube channel. And you are always welcome to reach out to our widely acclaimed technical support!
Of course, if you want to be in touch with us, you can also follow our LinkedIn page or subscribe to our newsletter. As a shameless plug, I also recommend following my personal LinkedIn page, where I write about various topics related to forensics, security, AI, and related policies from a broader perspective.
Finally, this year we launched another interesting project reserved for our Italian users: an Italian WhatsApp channel with all the main updates and interesting news.
Contributing to the Advances of the Forensic Community
Another crucial aspect of our work is collaborating with leading scientific forensic organizations and networks. Several people in Amped have been or are currently deeply involved, often with important roles, in organizations such as: ENFSI DIWG (European Network of Forensic Science Institutes – Digital Imaging Working Group), SWGDE (Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence) Video Committee, IEEE SPS IFS TC (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Signal Processing Society Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee) and many others.
We have been major contributors to various documents that set the international guidelines for the proper use and analysis of image and video evidence. These organizations are typically formed primarily by law enforcement or forensic practitioners, and it’s not always common to be accepted as industry contributors. But we firmly believe that only with the cooperation between users and technology providers we can advance and improve our field, if approached with an objective and scientific approach.
Raising Video Evidence Awareness with Policymakers
Working at multiple levels with analysts, researchers, and forensic organizations had a notable impact. However, at some point, we kept hitting a wall. Practitioners of the forensic field knew the challenges and potential of video evidence, but we realized that the stakeholders of the criminal justice system were many more: policymakers, judges, journalists, law enforcement chiefs, and even individuals.
Video evidence analysis is often taken for granted, because it seems something that anybody can do: we are used to taking pictures and watching YouTube videos. But if this is not taken seriously, especially in the age of AI-generated media, the risk of miscarriages of justice is huge.
For this reason, a few years ago, I started a program for raising awareness at various levels, with many meetings with policymakers and international law enforcement organizations and networks.
This year, we have continued this activity, for example, with these initiatives:
- We presented a Roadmap for Security and Justice in the AI era at the European Parliament,
- We contributed to a Symposium on AI in preventing and countering terrorism at the United Nations,
- And, again, we had the honor to be present as a sponsor at the Interpol General Assembly.
Drop by drop, we are realizing that our efforts are making an impact, and multimedia forensics is starting to be taken more seriously.
Building a Company and a Team for the Long Term
Of course, nothing of this can be done without building, growing, and directing a fantastic team. This is where most of my time is spent nowadays. While it’s a daily challenge, I really enjoy the strategic and human aspect as much as I enjoy the technological and scientific ones.
My management philosophy can be summarized in three points:
- Amped Inside: You should be enthusiastic about what you do
- Amped Outside: You should make our users enthusiastic about what we do
- Rule 1 is more important than Rule 2
Why Rule 3? This famous quote from Richard Branson puts it very well.
In 2025, the overall size of the team in our company group reached 51 people! And we are still growing. While still small on the grand scheme of things, when we started, I didn’t think I could ever reach a team of this size.
The last few years have brought a lot of consolidation in our industry: small players were bought by big players, big players were bought by huge players, and huge players went public.
We are one of the few companies that are still independent and focused on a specific forensic discipline, trying to do it as best as we can.
We don’t have any other company or investors owning a piece of Amped. Moreover, we are profitable and growing, only thanks to you, our loyal users. And this allows us to focus only on the user satisfaction. We don’t have industry owners to please, and we can keep speaking about improving the products, not shareholder values.
And ultimately, if there’s someone to blame, it’s me. I will take full responsibility for it.
I like to keep things simple. And of course, simple is not easy. 😉
Where Are We Going?
The world is changing rapidly. It’s essential to have a clear idea of where we want to go. And even more, our foundational values.
- My team is still MY first focus
- Our users are still OUR first focus
- We are fully committed ONLY to the multimedia forensics field
- We are not taking shortcuts: we are doubling down on forensic soundness, transparency, and compliance
- We are pragmatic with AI, using it with extreme care both internally and in our products, where it makes sense, and with attention to its risks
What is our final objective?
BEING THE GLOBAL STANDARD AND TRUSTED SINGLE SOURCE
FOR ANALYZING AND PROCESSING MULTIMEDIA
FOR PUBLIC SAFETY AND NATIONAL SECURITY 💪
For some aspects of what we do, we are already there… our tagline “setting the standard for image and video forensics” has been a reality for some years already. We are leading globally on forensic video enhancement, authentication, and proprietary video conversion. But there are so many more peaks to climb. Stay tuned!
P.S. It’s time to take some days off with our families and friends. Happy holidays to you all! See you in 2026. 👋