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.

TL;DR

In recent days, following the media attention on the Kenosha Shooting trial (“STATE OF WISCONSIN – VS – Kyle H. Rittenhouse”) in which Amped FIVE has been used for evidence analysis, a previous article on this blog about the use of Artificial Intelligence on image and video forensics has been misunderstood and instrumentalized.

The applicability of image interpolation and image enhancement at large as evidence in court has been discussed, sometimes without the needed in-depth knowledge of the field.

In this article, we will clarify some very important concepts related to forensic video analysis at large and Amped FIVE.

1) Amped FIVE does NOT use Artificial Intelligence

Amped FIVE has been designed specifically for evidentiary use. It does not use Artificial Intelligence: image and video enhancement in Amped FIVE are implemented in a forensic workflow based on carefully selected algorithms that guarantee reliability, repeatability, and reproducibility. Thanks to this, Amped FIVE has become widely accepted as the standard tool for forensic image and video analysis, being used in 100 countries worldwide.

2) Interpolation DOES NOT TAMPER with the image

We need interpolation to show things as they are: interpolation is not only used to “zoom on” an image, but it is an essential part of the creation and display of a digital photo or video. Interpolation does not add image information, but improves visualization of image data ^1,2,3. Questioning the general acceptability of interpolation means questioning the acceptability of images and videos as evidence.

3) Image enhancements performed by a competent analyst with the right tools are INSTRUMENTAL FOR COURT USE

An analyst with the right tools, technical preparation, and workflow can enhance the image in a way that can help the trier of fact and be accepted in court. Image enhancement is a fundamental part of forensic video analysis and it’s the duty of the forensic video analyst to properly enhance images and videos to give a more accurate representation of the scene, compensating, when possible, the imperfections introduced by the image generation process.

We hope this new take on the argument will help to better comprehend the topic and will clarify some of the misinterpretations of the original post. And if you want to learn more on these topics, please keep reading!

ATTENTION! Following the media attention on the Kenosha Shooting trial, this post about the use of AI on evidence analysis has been distorted. Take a look at why Amped FIVE does not use A.I., interpolation is a fundamental part of image DISPLAY and ENHANCEMENT (not tampering), and forensically sound algorithms are safe for use as evidence in court HERE »

Introduction

I’ve always been quite skeptical about the use of AI for forensics and investigations, as you may have seen in some of my older posts. In recent years most of the advancements in image and video enhancement, analysis, authentication, and tampering detection have been based on AI techniques. I don’t think we can exclude anymore anything which has something to do with AI, but it should be handled with extreme care. In this article, I will explain why in some contexts AI may be acceptable for forensics if used within some tight boundaries and safeguards.

Amped Software has its roots in academic research, and the first prototype of Amped FIVE actually started with my master’s thesis project in Electronic Engineering. In this article, I want to talk a bit about the relationship between Amped Software and science, the scientific method, and scientific research. As the title suggests, we’ll discuss what science gives to Amped and what Amped is giving back to scientific fields such as multimedia forensics, forensic video analysis, and forensic image and video enhancement. Curious? Keep reading!