Verifying Eye Witness Videos

The problem...

Verifying eye witness videos

Rick Turner

News outlets don't have a quick way to verify the eye-witness videos they receive.

But the footage is just

too juicynot to air and share

This leads to a lot of footagewhich is labelled 'unconfirmed'but gets broadcast anyway...

An example:

'Hamas using childrenas human shields'

It has more than 100,000 viewsIt was widely shared on social mediaIt was shown by national news outlets

But it wasn't reliable.The footage was shot in SyriaIt was shot it February

How can we use

technologyto fix the issue?

crowdsourcecredibility

'Shazam'the scene

Here's thetechnical bit...

There are two typesof data in a video:media & meta-data

meta-data

meta-dataGPS informationmdtacom.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709

meta-dataChronological informationmdtacom.apple.quicktime.creationdate

meta-dataDevice informationmdtacom.apple.quicktime.model

(An iPhone in these examples)

media

media SoundThe audio recorded

mediaVideoThe frames recorded

So we comparethe meta-dataacross the sources(there has to be more than one source for this to work)

And matchor 'shazam'the audio & video

Similarities in the audio and video of multiple videos are found automatically, and the videos are synced automatically.

...so if key points in the video & audio analysis match up...

...and all themeta-datamatches too

...then the videosmust verifyeach other

Some other(less depressing)possible uses

Twitter!** follow @Rick_Turner �

What if we could takeall of those thousands oftweeted photosfrom a sporting event

work outwhere they were takenusing the same technique

And take a virtual tour of

le tour

on a virtual mapwith the same pixel and geolocation matching tech

The possibilitiesare huge!

Thanks �Rick Turner

@Rick_Orchard (no swears)

@Rick_Turner (lots of swears)

orchard.co.uk