ivisX: An Integrated Video Investigation Suite for Forensic Applications

Video data from surveillance cameras are nowadays an important instrument for investigating crimes and identifying the identity of an offender. The analysis of the mass data acquired from numerous cameras poses enormous challenges to police investigation authorities. Supporting softwares and video management tools currently on the market focus either on elaborate visualization and editing of video data, specific image processing or video content analysis tasks. As a result, such a scattered system landscape further exacerbates the complexity and difficulty of a timely analysis of the available data. This work presents our unified framework ivisX, which is an integrated suite to simplify the entire workflow of video data investigation. The algorithmic backbone of ivisX is built upon an effective content-based search algorithm using region covariance for low-resolution (LR) data and a novel 3D face super-resolution (FSR) approach, which can generate high-resolution (HR) 3D face models to render high-quality facial composites with a single blurred and pixelated face image of the LR domain. Moreover, ivisX has a modular design, which allows for flexible incorporation of various extensions ranging from processing and display of video data from multiple cameras to analysis and documentation of the results into a powerful integrated toolkit to assist forensic investigation.