Dear Reader,
My name is Dominic Barker and I am a recent computer forensics graduate. I have just finished a 6 week placement with Staffordshire police and have written a prototype application that works with C4P and is capable of boosting CP categorisation efficiency by up to 50-60%.
This time saving directly corresponds to a reduction in costs, and reduction in time taken to get a case to the CPS. I believe that my application could benefit most forces from a time, monetary and examiner welfare perspective.
I am seeking interest from any high tech crime units in order to determine the viability of the project as a whole, as further development is required to make the product fully functional.
If you would like to know more about this or would like to put your name forward as an interested party, please PM me with your name, force (if applicable) and contact email and I shall contact you directly.
DarkNeon
To get this thread back on track…
This program sounds like an interesting idea. Who wouldn't want to save half the time categorizing?!
Time for me to jump in…
Just because it is that way in the USA and Canada doesn't mean it is that way everywhere. Most police forces in the UK outsource work (including child abuse cases) where it is left up to civilians to grade images. These people are doing the same exact job as LE but do not have access to the same tools. This leads to people spending more time (and more of LE's money) using alternative (and typically slower) methods to doing the same work.
Its all complete madness.
While I think it's a valid point foir discussion, surely it would be better discussed in a seperate thread rather than de-railing this one further? )
DarkNeon,
Are you talking about a optimising the extraction, grading or the query times between the C4P databse and the script / client?
Anything that improves the performance of such widely used process has to be a good thing.
By the way, I've begun to look at LACE, and it looks good. As for the LE / Non LE discussion, start an "it's only software after all" thread!
Firstly let me thank everyone who has replied or shown an interest in my work.
Pedro, the application I am developing essentially makes the examiner work more efficiently, by reducing the amount of images to process. It does this not by filtering, but by making the images more efficient to view. If you are with a police force/subcontractor who uses C4P let me know which and I'll give you more details.
I am back to actively working on the project, and should have more news regarding a release in the next few weeks.
Regarding LACE, it looks good but again depends on the price. Plus the approach I am taking with the project is "simple is good", examiners are under enough stress already so why complicate things.
If anyone has any suggestions for what features they would like to see in the final product, let me know via a PM and I'll see what I can do.
Hi All
Having worked with Dom and done testing on the early stages of his product I would suggest giving positive feed back and possible feature requests, as we still use his early revisions and find that it does save us time when categorising images using C4P.
From what Dom has done so far it does not replace C4P but work as a pre-categorisor in sorting the images to make the categorising process less time consuming and more productive.
Dom if you want to contact me at the office I can give you some ideas and further feedback on what you have done for us.
If you wish, I can do some testing for you and Ian has said that we will help where ever we can just get in touch.
Paul
Do not mean to derail this thread, and apologies for the self-promotion, but we(Digital Assembly - Makers of Adroit Photo Forensics) have been working with some LE folks out in the U.K. to get categorization support in similar to C4P.
Some of things we currently have are
1. Built in CP Profiles for U.K. and North America CP
2. The ability to create your own profiles for other case types. (Not limited to CP).
3. Multi-Language support for profiles.
4. Similar hotkeys to C4P.
5. Ability to categorize photos from multiple screen views.
6. Categorization for groups of photos.
7. Categorization is blazing fast.
Incoming
1. Ability to assign simple SmartFilter rules for automatic categorization
2. Using SmartHashing of known photos for automatic categorization
Our product is used in multiple industries and is not just a LE product. The demo is free to download and try.
Can anyone get this app to me in some way? I have asked 'DarkNeon' but he has not responded as yet.
Thanks
neddy
29.11.10 DarkNeon has responded to me via PM, many thanks.