Saturday, March 22, 2008

March 2008

It is a very nice start of the month. However it appears that there is some bad weather, so going on bicycle from Zandvoort to Heemstede is not always possible. We have started new projects.

Currently two students are working on PRNU, Pixel response Non Uniformity, and we try to use these methods in court. I am always aware of validation issues, and of course it should be more easy to use for the common user, for that reason we make them publicly available in Java on sourceforge if it works out fine.

Also students from Hogeschool Amsterdam are working on several projects. The project defraser, which is also open source at www.sourceforge.net/defraser, is really developing. We asked students to write plugins for JPEG, AVI en perhaps rewriting it for Linux. The software works for the analysis of videofiles, such as 3GP en MPEG, and could be used as assistance for repairing files. Since I am project leader of the project and also the database, I am very happy it works out fine.

Another project we are looking into is ENF collector. Electric Network Frequency appears to vary due to large generators, as is described by Catalin Grigoras. Currently we are looking into Java-applets for the collection of these, and of course we also need to do some more validation.

This month I also have a meeting of FIDIS www.fidis.net in Berlin. Our deliverable on forensic profiling is nearly ready, and I am very happy with the good collaboration. Also the JIDIS journal is getting good shape now, and our proposal for a new deliverable on identification (PRNU and face comparison) is also getting shape now.

The casework is also good, and sometimes surprising to find new solutions. This month I finished several reports, and now we add a form were the reader of the reports can give comments to the readability, since that is always an issue, especially if we make Bayesian way of conclusions (which are certainly in case with many hypothesis less easy to read).