Science Education: Summer Science Programs in Forensics

It is that time of year again for students and parents - time for signing students up for summer camps!

The South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics (USA) runs its Summer Science Programs (SSP) every summer. SSP is a residential summer camp for rising 8th, 9th and 10th graders. Both in-state and out-of-state students are accepted.

As usual, I'll be teaching two, one-week runnings of my course, Applied Forensic Science (formerly: A Mathematical Tour of Forensic Science), again this year.  In addition, Dr. Sid Parrish will be teaching his ever popular CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) course.  For those who, for some unimaginable reason, might want to take courses in subjects unrelated to forensics, there are a large number of offerings (Lego Robotics, Great Experiments in Classical Physics, and more).  If you are interested, you can find out more on their website. I hope to see you there!

Image Forensics: Bad "Photoshopped" Mad Men cover on Rolling Stones

The title of this post says it all - the writers at Jezebel (a celebrity news for women) wrote about it first. See for yourself.
Enjoy!

Science Education: Summer Science Programs in Forensics

The South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics (USA) runs its Summer Science Programs (SSP) every summer. SSP is a residential summer camp for rising 8th, 9th and 10th graders. Both in-state and out-of-state students are accepted.


I'll be teaching two, one-week runnings of my course, A Mathematical Tour of Forensic Science, again this year.  In addition, Dr. Sid Parrish will be teaching his ever popular CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) course.  For those who, for some unimaginable reason, might want to take courses in subjects unrelated to forensics, there are a large number of offerings (Lego Robotics, Great Experiments in Physics, and more).  If you are interested, you can find out more on their website. I hope to see you there!

Image Forensics: Seeing is NOT believing

Spectrum Magazine (by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, or IEEE, USA) has an excellent overview article on detecting tampering in digital photographs by Professor Hany Farid (Dartmouth College, USA).

Enjoy!

Admin: Summer Science Program in Forensics

The South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics (USA) runs its popular Summer Science Programs (SSP) every summer. SSP is a residential summer camp for rising 8th, 9th and 10th graders. I'll be teaching two, one-week runnings of my course, A Mathematical Tour of Forensic Science, again this year. If you are interested, you can find out more on their website. I hope to see you there.

Photography: Automatic panning device for gigabit images

Engadget profiled the GigaPan Epic some time ago. The Epic is a robotic camera mount that holds your point-and-shoot digital camera and then automatically pans the visual scene, taking picture after picture (up to thousands, according to the manufacturer). Software is included that then automatically stiches the individual images into a single digital panoramic image. Very cool. The inventor used it at the recent inauguration to capture a panorama of the mall. Many more images can be found at a community page devoted to these images. Here is a link to the product page with more details (and the sales price).

Why would anyone need so many pixels in an image? Over the Christmas holidays, the pundits were telling us that no one needs more than, say, 6 megapixels in a camera. Two examples where more pixels are needed include when one needs to zoom in to get small details or when one requires very wide angle shots with good resolution (i.e. which is hard to do with a fisheye lens or a dome mirror).

A potential forensics application is crime scene photography, thanks not only to its functionality, but also its modest cost and compatibility with a wide range of digital cameras.

Enjoy!

Image Restoration: iMovie Stabilization feature

Despite the best of intentions, I have not yet been able to get around to testing Apple's new iMovie video stabilization feature for the Mac OS (Operating System). I will, however, whet you appetite with a Macworld review I've come across that gives examples.

Enjoy!

Image Recognition: Facial recognition feature in iPhoto

I installed Apple's iPhoto '09 last night to test how the face recognition feature (called "Faces", of all things) worked. There are nearly 4,000 photos in my personal library, so I left it running overnight while it went through the database and, I assume, ran its face detection algorithm. I then decided to run a test. I manually identified the same person in two different photographs and had iPhoto go out and locate matches, which is its next step in its learning process - the user next needs to confirm or not confirm the identity of each one of the identifications it produces.

So how did it do at the end of this first step? Surprisingly well is the answer, particularly for a consumer-grade product. The raw numbers were 72 correct and 16 incorrect at this first step, but that doesn't tell the whole story. In the instances where it was incorrect, all but three were confused with family members (which admittedly is the most likely confusion outcome since for all pictures with faces in the database, generally at least one is a family member). In addition, it also correctly chose pictures where only one eye was visible, where the age was significantly different, and where there were different emotions clearly visible on the faces. It also did not seem to have a problem with different compression levels, low resolution (including one that was very granulated), face paint, under-exposure, black-and-white, scans (of printed pictures), and color. Finally, it made only one error out of 86 pictures in correctly detecting and locating the face.

So, even though this was not a properly constructed test, the results were more than impressive enough to warrant looking at it further for professional use in some applications.

PS. This is not a product review, per se, but I should say that my experience with this just-released version was not all positive. Namely, it was horribly slow during the step where one has to select a picture, go into the Faces mode, and then type in the subject's name. Each entry took two to three minutes to accomplish, so I saw the "spinning beach ball" that Mac OS-X uses to let you know it is busy quite a lot. Hopefully this bug will get corrected and patched quickly.

Image Recognition: Facial and license plate recognition news items

There are two on-line news articles related to image recognition that I would like to bring to your attention.

The first news article is about law enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, USA using a facial recognition package to match 16 years worth of prisoner mug shots with pictures taken by ATM (Automated Teller Machines) in a forgery and theft investigation to generate the lead needed to solve the case.

The second news article is from New Orleans, Louisiana, USA where local law enforcement used a license-plate recognition system to make 20 arrests and recover 23 stolen vehicles and license plates in a 25 day period.

The common thread here is, of course, automatic image recognition. These software algorithms have come a long way in the last decade. However, one should understand that the conditions are partially or completely controlled in both of these applications - i.e. distance, lighting, exposure, aspect (turned toward the camera), and (possibly) compression all fall within acceptable boundaries. In addition, with the license plate recognition problem, the character set and fonts were known in advance. The controlled conditions and a priori knowledge significantly increase the accuracy of the results tremendously and the chances of a successful investigation and prosecution.

(Hat-tip to JUSTNETNews, USA - I highly recommend this free service of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, or NLECTC, which is part of the National Institute of Justice, USA)

Photoshop: Most blatant Photoshopped covers

I met a graphics artist today whose job is to "Photoshop" pictures for advertisements. We got to comparing stories and she mentioned an incident involving Kate Winslet, the actress, where her legs were slimmed a bit too drastically and caused a stir. Well, before long we were pulling out my MacBook and Googling for that and other instances of "Photoshopped" covers. Here is the best link we found.

Enjoy!

Image Forensics: An interview with Hany Farid

SiliconValley has an interview with image forensics researcher Hany Farid. My favorite excerpt was this:

Farid first conceived of the possibilities of digital forensics while at MIT, waiting in the checkout line at the library. Restless, he picked up a copy of the Federal Rules of Evidence, then started randomly reading. What he saw startled him: Film and digital images were equivalent evidence, in the eyes of the court.

"This just seemed like a bad idea,'' he said. "Not that I'm good at seeing the future — but I could tell this would be a problem."

Of course, susceptibility to tampering is not the only thing to be considered when evaluating the relative merits of digital imagery as evidence, but it is obvious that tampering with a digital copy is easier to do and (possibly) get away with than tampering with film or tape.

Enjoy!

Image Forensics: Was North Korean leader's photograph tampered with?

A photograph was released by the North Korean government last week that purported to show Kim Jong-il, their national leader, reviewing military troops - and looking suspiciously healthy after reportedly suffering a stroke. The Times Online and BBC (both center-left UK newspapers) report on the discrepancies in the photograph, including mismatching shadows and a missing black line.

Physics: A round-up of recent interesting links!

My aplogies for my light posting of late. Outside commitments have kept me from posting nearly as much as I would like. Here is a collection of links that I have saved up over the last several weeks to blog about. I hope you enjoy them, but please note that some of these are not serious, scientific articles - just because it can be found on the Internet doesn't make it science, much less forensic science! If you are particularly interested in any of the topics addressed below, just let me know and I'll delve further in a future posting.

K-Lite codec package update

X-rays made from Scotch(R) tape (hat tip to A.A.)

Superconductivity Can Induce Magnetism

Deaf people feel their way to speech

Seeing Through The Skin: Optic-less Imaging Technology Could Beat Lens-based Imaging Devices

HOWTO read the secret forensic dots in your laser-printer output

Biometric identifcation by body language

Sound-card oscilloscope

Audio bone headphones

Scientists Watch As Listener's Brain Predicts Speaker's Words

Hidden airport scanner will pinpoint terrorists

Overpaid professions

Military camouflage

Police probe cell phones to catch criminals

How magicians control your mind

How forensic lab techniques work

Computers reassemble pieces of fractured archaeology

Review of Microsoft's Photosynth

Images of atmospheric optics

12 worst Photoshop mistakes ever

Darpa super-resolution vision technology R&D

How other senses adjust to blindness

Family name geographical profiler

Image Recognition: Military requirements push technology forward

The Strategy Page has an article about how the proliferation of video on the battlefield (e.g. from surveillance cameras and even night vision goggles) is driving technology development. Initially, it was the UK (United Kingdom) that drove image recognition technology with its massive deployment of CCTV in public spaces (e.g. train stations, airports, city centers, and shopping malls). Now, it is the military.

The benefit from computer-assistance in analyzing video comes from the following:

1. Volume (i.e. the sheer number of cameras and, hence, images to be monitored and/or analyzed)
2. Concentration (i.e. the human visual system loses the ability to concentrate effectively on images after about 20 minutes of continuous viewing)
3. Memory (i.e. computers can track and, possibly, predict more things simultaneously than a human can because, generally speaking, computers are not nearly as attention and working-memory limited in the short-term as humans and far outstrip us in their ability to recall video sequences over the long term - they can just play back the video recording off of their hard disks)
   

The article claims that the abilities of computer systems to recognize patterns is rapidly improving and approaching that of humans - that is no small feat as humans are simply amazing in their ability to perform real-time pattern analysis.

One intriguing point made in the article is that the current conflicts are generating a lot of real-world recordings of "bad behavior" that can be used to train and test new pattern analysis and prediction algorithms - training data like this is like gold to us signal processing types!

Enjoy!

Image Forensics: Adobe launches CS4

Adobe has launched the latest version of its Creative Suite, which includes, most importantly for image/video forensic types, Photoshop. Headline features of Photoshop CS4 include:

• GPU-based drawing of documents onscreen (for speed improvements)
  
• 64-bit for Windows (but not for Mac OS-X, at least yet)
  
• Expanded 3-D paint, lighting and rendering tools

Hat tip: Ars Technica

Admin: National NATIA conference

I haven't missed many national NATIA conferences over the past twelve years or so, but this year I will unless I can exploit some quantum mechanical effect on a macro scale - I can't be in two places at once. So, I'm off to points south instead of west. Enjoy the conference, you who can attend, and I look forward to hearing about any interesting a/v forensic happenings. Cheers!

Image Forensics: New blog - Forensic Photoshop

There is a "new" (i.e. started this year) forensic blog that goes into some of the nitty gritty details of image forensics. Forensic Photoshop is penned by Jim Hoerricks, who is an experienced practitioner in the field. I've found his posts to be both very interesting and current. Enjoy!

Image Forensics: Augmenting video restoration & enhancement with a forensic artist

The math, science, and technology used in video forensic filtering and forensic video analysis can work minor, and sometimes major, miracles. However, it is not "the be all and end all", as the saying goes. This article in Forensic Magazine uses an actual case to show where a professional forensic artist was able to use knowledge of human physiology and such to generate a full frontal facial drawing of a suspect from a single frame of a security camera video taken at from the standard elevated position. Let's hear it for the liberal art majors!

Image Recognition: Military uses pattern recognition to detect bomb planting activity

I wanted to call your attention to an article by the Strategy Page on how the US military in Iraq is using pattern recognition on imagery to detect IED (Improvised Explosive Device) emplacement activities.

A very simple implementation of this technique is to take a picture on Day 1, then another picture from the same location and in the same direction on Day 2. Next subtract the two images from each other and see what is left over. All the things that did not change between the two images will disappear and only those things that changed will be left! In this case, what will be see on the "difference image" might be some disturbed gravel, tire tracks off the side of the road (assuming it is a road-side bomb emplacement) or, if the military guys are really lucky, what will be left is a bunch of guys standing around with shovels and a bomb as they work to put it in place. Neat (and helpful)!

Forensics: New technique recovers fingerprints from bullet casings after firing

Forensic scientists at the University of Leicester (UK) and Northamptonshire Police (UK) have announced a way to recover fingerprints from fired shell casings. The technique involves the use of an electric charge to attract an electrically conductive powder to the minute amount of corrosion caused by handling the shell casing. The act of firing the bullet actually improves the ability of the technique to recover the print. For more information, see this article from Science Daily.

PS. On re-reading my post, I noticed that I did not supply any answer to the obvious question of "so what?". The reason this technique is particularly interesting is that it potentially provides additional forensic evidence that could identify participants in gun crimes. Imagine being able to re-open a "cold case", for instance a drive-by shooting, using nothing more than a spent shell casing (and a fingerprint database, of course). Hopefully, there will not be any hidden "gotchas" in the details and this technique will be able to fulfill its initial promise.