Video-Based Evidence Analysis and Extraction in Digital Forensic Investigation

Abstract

As a result of the popularity of smart mobile devices and the low cost of surveillance systems, visual data are increasingly being used in digital forensic investigation. Digital videos have been widely used as key evidence sources in evidence identification, analysis, presentation, and report. The main goal of this paper is to develop advanced forensic video analysis techniques to assist the forensic investigation. We first propose a forensic video analysis framework that employs an efficient video/image enhancing algorithm for the low quality of footage analysis. An adaptive video enhancement algorithm based on contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is introduced to improve the closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage quality for the use of digital forensic investigation. To assist the video-based forensic analysis, a deep-learning-based object detection and tracking algorithm are proposed that can detect and identify potential suspects and tools from footages.

Keywords

• Forensics investigation
• forensic video analysis
• video/image enhancement
• object detection
• deep learning