Scientists Unveiled a Software that could Help Identify ISIS Executioners

Spanish researchers have unveiled software that can scan a video and pinpoint exactly where it was shot. They say the system could help locate execution sites. Researchers from the Ramón Llull University (Spain) created the system capable of geolocating videos by comparing their audiovisual content with a worldwide multimedia database.

It could help find out exactly where terrorists are holding hostages, or identify a missing person.
In the future this could help to find people who have gone missing after posting images on social networks, or even to recognise locations of terrorist execution, they claim. The method is based on the recognition of their images or frames and all of the audio.

‘The acoustic information can be as valid as the visual and, on occasions, even more so when it comes to geolocating a video,’ said Xavier Sevillano, one of the authors. The method is based on the recognition of their images or frames and all of the audio. All of the data obtained is merged together and grouped in clusters so that, using computer algorithms developed by the researchers, they can be compared with those of a large collection of recorded videos already geolocated around the world.

‘In this field we use some physics and mathematical vectors taken from the field of recognition of acoustic sources, because they have already demonstrated positive results’. Many of the videos available online are accompanied by text which provides information on the place where it was filmed, but there are others that do not present this information.

This complicates the application of the ever more frequent geolocation tools of multimedia content.
In their study, published in the journal ‘Information Sciences’, the team has used almost 10,000 sequences as a reference from the MediaEval Placing task audiovisual database, a benchmarking initiative or assessment of algorithms for multimedia content.