July 2010

Last week I testified in a court case on images, and as usual people become confused with the things they see on CSI and the forensic examination of images and video. I often have to explain that sometimes the image processing which is shown at CSI is not realistic, since we have to cope with the limitation of the sensors, and they have a limited resolution. Often on CCTV it is difficult to do a proper forensic comparison of faces and other objects, and a limited conclusion can be drawn from it. However, there are exceptions.

It is getting summer now, and I do not have any backlog anymore in casework, so we can schedule better, however sometimes cases come in at unexpected moments, and it can change very soon. We are also working on new work for the camera identification, as well as forensic examinations of colours from objects. Before August 1st, I will also propose one or two papers, and perhaps a workshop for next years AAFS www.aafs.org meeting. Furthermore, we are currently working on the ENFSI Forensic IT Working group meeting in Moscow in September www.enfsi.org .

June 2010

Last month was busy with the World Conference on IT where the NFI also signed a MOU with Microsoft. I gave a presentation on the huge efforts that we have to do in reverse engineering of software and hardware for extracting information from devices from manufacturers. Some manufacturers will provide information on their file formats, however others do not know or will not give information, and then we have to spend lots of time on reverse engineering, which also could be spend on examining other products such as reverse engineering malware in forensic casework.

It was also busy with casework and of course the R&D projects. Currently I also have three students that are working on camera identification under the different circumstances. And of course we have many groups of students that are working on various programming tasks, such as our open source software defraser for video analysis and repair. Also there we further progress, as we have version which is much more interactive which will be released soon.

Next week we organize a tour and BBQ as well as a day on forensic video investigation for our customers (currently over 100 people have signed up), and then it gets summer, so somewhat more time to spend on writing reports, articles etc. During the WCIT I was also invited for the Techno Security 2010 in Myrtle Beach to give a presentation, however due to the huge amount of work, I was unable to be there, however I will give some contribution to the conference via Skype.