Forensics Evidence Collection with Video Analytics

 By Asenika Liyanage  11/19/2020 

A highly growing area of the Online platforms are Videos. It is expected by 2021, about 80% of the online traffic to consist of  Video data. Therefore, Video Analytics are important in aspects like marketing, brand promotion, and other consumer related surveys. However, there is a less researched, yet key importance of Video Analytics.That is the use of Video analytics in Forensic evidence collection and analysis. There are some important tools used for video analytics. 

What do you mean by Video Analytics?

Video analytics is a form of data analytics based on video data. There are two main concepts behind video analytics, 

• Pattern Recognition
• Motion Detection 

Pattern Recognition is the art of identifying and tracking objects which are of less focus in the video at a glance. Thereby, patterns can be identified, where objects have been moved, changed or missing in certain parts or whole videos. 

motion detection is the study of examining each pixel the video, to identify movements in the video. 

 Most of the video analytics tools are facilitating real-time video analytics facilities. Thereby, it is possible to find abnormalities, inconsistencies and changes in video data in real-time.

There are different uses of Video Analytics with regard to Security and fraud detection, such as, 

• Facial recognition 
• Identification of objects in the videos 
• License plate detection 
• Detecting perimeter intrusion in real time etc. 

After identifying and obtaining important data from videos, it is possible for the analysts to use those data in their intended purposes. Such purposes maybe to trigger certain actions like,  contacting security personnel,  recording suspicious actions, detect and alert about trademark misuses etc. 

Use of Video Analytics in Forensic Purposes 

It is relatively less known that, Video Analytics can be used in the Forensic Evidence Collection. Some of the advanced modern Video Analytics tools are very much helpful in carrying out work of Forensic Investigators. These tools are helping investigators save lot of time, and work on finding evidences for a crime. 

Theses tools are using concepts such as advanced facial recognition based on highly trained algorithms, Object detection and tracking, demographic analytics etc. 

Simplification of Forensic investigations on Video data 

Video data is not new. Neither does use of those in forensic sciences. However, earlier days, what investigators had to do was going through Security camera footage or other videos manually, watching hours of videos, rewinding and re-rewinding. 

Currently, through Intelligent Agents used in these Video Analytics tools, it is more convenient to get videos from video archives, based on its content, rather than manually searching through all the videos. So, Video Analytics are not just for finding perimeter infringements, but for finding evidence in a large video archive as well. 

Different Forensic Capabilities of these tools  

• Write and execute customized queries on searching videos. 
• Tracking Specific Individuals and their moments across Videos. 
• Recognize individuals through Facial matching 
• Tagging of individuals to backtrack their past moments etc. 

You can read further on to these topics, on following articles. 

Further reading  

1. Video Analytics For Forensics: Analytics-based Forensic Evidence Collection

2. 9 best video analytics tools