68 FUTURESHOCK InVID
The InVID project is coordinated by Dr Vasileios Mezaris of the Greek research organisation CERTH (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas) with CERTH researchers developing some of the individual components of the InVID toolkit. The InVID developers are also working with partners to develop wider applications for the tools. Consortium partner Condat AG, based in Berlin, is creating a verification plug-in for the Annova Open Media newsroom content management system. Condat is an Annova reseller. The commercialisation of the InVID tools is subject to negotiations among the consortium. “If the project partners are doing something that they then want to sell on the market, there has to be some agreement on how it is marketed and how revenues are shared,” notes Spangenberg. “For example, because it is a cooperative project, if Condat wants to market and sell its add-on, there has to be an agreement under which it can be used – a licence agreement or revenue sharing model.” Vienna-based company and consortium partner Web Lyzard is also helping to develop a dashboard for social media analysis of trending topics, using the InVID platform.
IF YOU FIND THAT COMPONENTS OR KEYFRAMES OF A VIDEO HAVE APPEARED TWO WEEKS AGO, OR TWO YEARS AGO, THEN IT’S FAIRLY LIKELY THAT THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL CONTENT
events or socially-charged issues. Being able to quickly identify their origin helps to
clear the way for actual reporting. “If you find that components or
keyframes of a video have appeared two weeks ago, or two years ago, then it’s fairly likely that this is not original content,” says DW’s Spangenberg. “If it claims to be from a news event that’s happened yesterday – a plane crash, say – but you can find that video with the same shots elsewhere, it’s unlikely the video really is from yesterday, and they’ve taken an old one and tried to fool the world.” InVID offers some impressive image and video keyframe analysis tools as well. The simplest is a basic image inspection enabling users to magnify, sharpen, flip or apply bicubic interpolation to an image. At the other end is InVID’s Image Verification Assistant, a forensic analysis tool, particularly valuable in detecting fabrication or manipulation of material. When given an image to verify, the tool offers multiple types of forensic feedback, including detection of JPEG ghosts, double JPEG quantisation and JPEG blocking artefact inconsistencies, high frequency noise, and CAGI analysis. These tools can be highly effective in detecting manipulation, editing, and extra compositing in images or video keyframes. The InVID consortium has also been working on tools for automatic logo detection, useful for helping journalists locate the producers of a video or image, whether it was branded by a news agency or a terrorist group. And the InVID plug-in features a new rights and copyright status checker, still in the development stages. MEDIA PARTNERS By last count, the InVID plug-in had 5900 users, with fast and wide adoption by the journalistic and verification communities. The only other tool comparable, says Spangenberg, is Amnesty International’s YouTube DataViewer, which extracts video metadata and keyframes, and offers a keyframe Google image search.
BUILDING A TOOL KIT Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle, one of the consortium partners, has been involved in the InVid video verification project since its launch in January 2016. The aim is to develop components that can identify misleading content
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