Multimedia Analytics for Image Collection Forensics

This chapter focuses on techniques suited for forensic analysis of large image collections. In digital forensics an investigator is often tasked to analyze a data source containing large numbers of images and their metadata sometimes reaching into the millions. Apart from the content of the images there is a lot of information present in the metadata. The chapter considers the specifics of datasets and tasks in the forensic field. Two fields underlying multimedia analytics namely multimedia analysis and visual analytics are explained. The principles from those fields provide the basis for describing two-example multimedia analytics systems. The ChronoBrowser is used as a multimedia analytics system developed for forensic analysis. The chapter shows how different visual analytics processes are instantiated within ChronoBrowser. The MediaTable is considered as example of a concept based multimedia analytics system. The chapter presents a scenario to show how multimedia analytics can aid forensic investigators.