Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB Motivation
Since the attacks in Madrid, London and Paris, there has been growing public awareness of the threat of terrorist violence. The events following the attack on the Boston marathon have shown how willing people are to support the investigating authorities with clues, especially with image and video data from the crime scene. But they also showed how quickly trust in the government's investigative work can dwindle if results are delayed and the impression is created that the police are not following up on the information provided by the population. In the wake of the attack in Boston, for example, online groups were spontaneously formed which evaluated freely accessible images of the crime scene independently of the authorities. The results of these evaluations were subsequently taken up by the press and ultimately led to the suicide of a person not involved in the crime.
Since the Boston attack, various precautions have been taken in Germany to be able to receive image and video mass data from the population via an Internet cloud that can be temporarily switched on. What is still missing, however, is an adequate evaluation infrastructure and a sufficiently qualified staff capacity, without which deficits in the prompt and efficient processing of clues and leads in the event of an attack could be expected in Germany as well. The loss of confidence that would occur in this context would also have a negative impact on the socio-political climate in the country.
Project goals
The aim of the PERFORMANCE project is to prevent the impending loss of confidence in the work of official investigators. To this end, business models are to be researched which allow private sector resources to be used for image and video analysis where necessary in order to speed up the investigative work. Legal and social framework conditions are to be observed in the development of appropriate technical-organisational implementation models. For the evaluation of the business models, a cooperative system platform for video upload, evaluation, semi-automated analysis and archiving is to be realised.