forensic video analysis

  Hello, in this Blog we'll be demonstrating Cognitech Video Investigator's Active Interface The Active Interface is a user interface used by many of our tools and filters, designed for speed, flexibility,and precision in mind when processing images and videos. For this demonstration, we'llbe using the active interface with the obscure and highlight filters. Both of which are foundin the Filters menu under Editing. And I'll begin with the obscure filter. This filter allows you to obscure an image or a portion of an image. In this case, I only want to obscure the man's face. So i can do that by making a selection over his face like this And in real time, the filter is applied only to that specific area. The important thing to understand-about the active itnerface is that everything happens in real time. So as I change parameter settings here, we'll see those settings take effect right here in my selection-area in real time. If I don't want that to happen, I can click on this Active button. And now, I can adjust my parameter settings and nothing will happen untillI re-acticate the filter I could also click on Original to see the before and after of this image before it was processed with this particular filter. Another important thing to understandabout the active itnerface is that you can have a lot of-control over your processing by choosing different-parameter settings for each individual frame of video.

 

 For example, we're on frame 1 and I have a parameter setting with 10. Now if I go to a different frame such as frame 20, I can have a parameter setting of say, 30. And I can do this on each individual frame depending on the needs of my evidence image or video. Now if I wanted to very quickly copy over parameter settings from one frame to another I can click on Copy then go to a desired frame I'm back at frame one and I can choose paste. And we'll se that this number changes as I do that. Copy paste works on one-individual video frame. but if I want to copy and paste over several video frames, I can choose Copy, and Duplicate. and now every single frame of video will have the same parameter settings. I could even select a range of frames such as from frame 1 through 30, adjust my parameter settings, and then Copy/Duplicate And now frames 1 through 30 the selection I made, willhave one set of parameters and the other frames will have another set So that way, you can very very quickly adjust parameter settings for a big group of frames. Something you may have noticed is that as I was edditing frames they became blue on the movie controller The blue color indicates that a specific frame has had their parameters altered. If they have not been altered the frames appear gray. and that just signifies that the frame will be processed at the default setting for the particular filterthat you're using. In this case, the obscure filter If I hit reset here, we'llsee the default setting and that is a setting of 8. And when I did that, you can see that theframe is no longer blue. Another thing you may have noticed, is that the selection box I created only exists on frame one. but not on any other frame. And that's because when you'reworking with the active interface, you have controll over the selection box on eachindividual frame as well. And if I wanted to, I cancopy over selection boxes with these copy, paste,and duplicate buttons. but earlier, we where using parameter mode, which only copies over parameters I can switch it over to selection box mode which will copy over slection boxes only or I can switch this over toparameter slash slection box mode. which will copy over my parameters and selection box. So let me show you that now. If I change my parameters, change my selection box and then copy, duplicate we can see that now, every single frame will have that box in that same location and it will have the same parameters. Now let me show you some advanced thingsthat we can do with these selection boxes and the active interfacewith the highlight filter. So let me close this  I will not save it. I'll go to editing, Highlight. As you may have imaginged, the highlight filter alows you to highlight and image or a portion of an image. In this case, again, I want to highlight only the man's face. And, I want to copy over my selection box to every single frame and I want to copy my currentparamters to every single frame because they do not exist on other frames. So I'll switch over to selectionbox and parameter mode. Copy Duplicate And now, we have the same settingsand the same selection box on every single frame. But if I play this video, We can see that the mans face does notstay in the same location. So well have to have a different-selection box over every frame in order to track the man. We can do this in a couple of different ways. I could manualy move the slection box from-frame to frame like this. In order to track this individual. I could also grab a range of frames like this by holding Shift and draging the cursor over the movie controller. and then copy/duplicate my selection box. and then do that again In that way I can ensure that the man's face will stay under a selection-box over a group of frames and very quickly  track him And lastly, there isan even faster method. which i enjoy which is by pressing play and dragging the selection-box with the mouse we can very quickly track an object in motion. Now, I didn't let go fastenough, so I will have to adjust some frames manually. Let's see But just like that, very quickly I was able to track this person It looks like maybe there was one more. Frame 3 Ok. And now that we've done that We can click on process Finish And if I play back the video We'll have a highlight filterapplied over a tracked area So that's it for the activeinterface for this video. We hope you found it helpful. Thank you for Reading.