The technology, trained at Taskforce Argos, Queensland Police in Australia,  will help investigators filter out relevant information, speed up investigations and free up time to prioritize investigative work such as victim identification.

Gothenburg, Sweden, May 24, 2018 ­– Griffeye, one of the world’s premier platforms for managing, building and sharing digital media, and used by law enforcement agencies across the world, today announced the release of new AI technology that will help investigators filter out relevant information, speed up investigations and free up time to prioritize investigative work such as victim identification. The technology has been trained on child sexual abuse material at Taskforce Argos, Queensland Police in Australia.

AI technology opens up whole new possibilities for investigators. One of the big challenges that law enforcement face today are the large volumes of data, often millions of files, that investigators have to deal with. Finding the clues needed to identify and rescue children is often like looking for a needle in a haystack, and information is often found too late, or not at all. The manual classification also puts investigators under a lot of mental strain, and results in increased investigation times.

“Technology can help solve some of those problems and our hope is that the AI technology produced in the Griffeye Brain programme will provide important relief to strained investigators,” said Johann Hofmann, Director and Head of Griffeye. “Instead of getting bogged down in trying to manually go through the data, it will help them prioritize and free up time to spend time on analysis and solving crime.”

The AI scans through previously unseen footage and suggests images that it believes depicts child sexual abuse content. The AI outputs a score that can be used to tell whether a file is pertinent to the investigation or not.

“These first tests show very promising results. They show that AI performs well in some of the toughest application and that it has great potential,” said Hofmann. “However, the results from the AI technology doesn’t by any means take the human investigator out of the loop. Instead it aids the investigator in making qualified assessments. What it does do is automatically group and filter material and it helps investigators prioritize.”

“The next step is to see how the technology works in different settings,” Hofmann continued. “We know it works on live data managed within Taskforce Argos’ database in Queensland Australia, but we still need to find out how it works on data in other countries that is possibly classified based on other jurisdictions. We hope to work with our users to continue develop the technology and improve it even further.”

The version released today is the first beta version, that will be further developed and fine-tuned in several stages during 2018. The Griffeye AI program, called Griffeye Brain, aims to innovate how AI is applied to law enforcement work processes. The CSA classifier is the first outcome of the programme.

The Griffeye Brain CSA classifier has been trained on real CSA case data at Taskforce Argos, Queensland Police in Australia. Training the algorithm on real data is necessary for it to work and it is absolutely crucial how the training is conducted and what data it is being trained on.

“The performance of the AI algorithm is directly related to the quality of the data that it is trained on,” said Hofmann. “Taskforce Argos’ database is one of the best, quality assured databases in the world.”