An Icelandic high-tech company has developed a service that assists police detectives in identifying illegal video material on seized computers. The service is fully automatic, highly reliable, and can save significant cost. It supports investigators by identifying videos automatically.
About the product:
Police investigation departments are spending much time on manually identifying illegal video material. These cases cover crimes such as downloads and distribution of illegal pornography (especially in connection with minors), racist propaganda and copyright protected movies and TV productions.
In any kind of such investigation cases police detectives need to go over many 1000 hours of video material and register the content in order to make them capable of charging the suspect(s) at court. As there are no effective tools provided to the police up to now, this work is mostly done manually or with the help of very inefficient and unrobust hash-codes.
The offered product, however, makes this work of video recognition a fully automatic task, and saves therefore time and money. The system retains an extremely high detection rate (> 99,5%) while simultaneously ensuring that no video material is falsely identified. The system combines effective image retrieval technology with very fast database technology for multimedia data.
In order to make the system capable of identifying a video, it needs to analyze its content and register to a central database. This is done by using visual 'fingerprints'. A visual fingerprint is a complex sequence of numbers calculated from many contrast points from each frame of a video file (not related to watermarks!). Once this is done, the system "knows" the video's content and is now able to recognize any part of it, anywhere in the world, even when its visual information has been heavily distorted.
The system is built on top of a novel high dimensional database technology (patent protected) which is able to perform accurate approximate high-dimensional nearest neighbour queries in constant time, independent of the size of the fingerprint collection. This simply means it is possible to scale the system immensely without ever compromising speed or accuracy.

Innovative Aspects:
The system identifies movies even when they are heavily modified. Among common modifications it can handle are strong compression, subtitles, mirroring, cropping, re-encoding, contrast changes, cam-rips and scores of other methods.

There is a global market for the solution as the police worldwide are manually searching for illegal material and looking for methods to spend time and money more wisely. Practical experience has shown at least 50% time savings on the investigation process for police detectives.

 

Patents/Rights: Patent(s) granted

Type of Organisation: