During investigations and trials, video is one of the most common and most effective forms of evidence, but unfortunately, it is often taken for granted. There are many challenges to consider in relation to video evidence, and we believe it is of crucial importance to understand how users around the world are handling these and how the trends are shaping the state of video forensics in 2022 and beyond. For this reason, we launched in July a survey to hear the thoughts and opinions of video evidence practitioners from around the world. 

Many questions were raised, such as:

• “What are the most useful and common types of evidence during an investigation?”
• “What are the main issues while working on video?”
• “Which kind of training did you receive on image and video forensics?
• “How long does it take to work on an image/video case on average?”

We received some very interesting answers and discovered some useful key findings that will help us predict what are the upcoming trends that your agency, organization, and lab are facing or will soon need to face.  

Here are five video forensics trends that you need to be aware of for 2023. Read on to find out the results!

by Martino Jerian, CEO and Founder of Amped Software

In a nutshell: a digital image is created by a sequence of physical and digital processes that ultimately produce a representation of light information in a specific moment in a specific place, as a sequence of 0s and 1s. The technical limitations of the imaging system will introduce some defects that will make the image different compared to the original scene, and often less intelligible during investigations. The image generation model aims to understand how these defects are introduced, and in which order to correct them in the proper sequence and obtain a more accurate and faithful valid representation of the scene.

In the past years, policymakers dedicated a lot of attention to cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and privacy, especially in relation to video surveillance and public safety. While these are very important topics, I think we need to also dedicate some attention to the more fundamental issues that often go unnoticed and relate to the proper understanding of image and video evidence, both during investigations and in court.

In April 2021, we had our second Amped User Days, an event reserved for our users which put together 298 people from 34 different countries.

While we are in constant communication with our users, we wanted to get a bird’s eye view of the industry and behaviors with video evidence so we took the opportunity to ask them to contribute to our study by replying to a few questions.

I thought some of the highlights from the survey were quite interesting, so I’ll go over them in this post.

Read on to see some of our questions and replies from our users.

Very often when potential customers are researching products, a pretty common question they ask us is “who’s using your software?”. We take privacy and security very seriously, and we don’t publish customers’ names or logos without their permission. This permission, for public safety and national security organizations, is actually quite hard to get by official means or takes way too long. So we are rarely nominating users and cases explicitly.

In this post, we are sharing some aggregated data you may find interesting. It is being published in December 2021, so if you are reading this later, the numbers will likely be higher.