Project S-Five

I received an invitation to take a survey being run by Project S-Five. It's an EU based study, not to be confused with Amped Software's FIVE. Here's what the project is about.

"About Project S-Five

Throughout the last decade, the digital video and surveillance industry has developed and expanded at an ever increasing pace. Unfortunately, the images and video recordings that are most often provided to forensic investigators are composed of rather low quality image data. Analysing such data requires considerable knowledge and tuning of different parameters in various software tools. As a consequence, forensic laboratories are most often overloaded with image and video analysis casework, and have experienced considerable difficulty in keeping up with recent developments both in terms of (academic and commercial) R&D and available software tools. Additionally, from an organizational point of view, an overview of the methods and procedures that are currently being used across the ENFSI member institutes is lacking. This hinders a unified methodology of dealing with this type of evidence and the development of standardization and quality assurance issues in general. Finally, there exists an urgent need for reference input material that can be used for evaluation and training of (new) investigators, for testing and validation of existing and new software tools, etc.

S-FIVE

This project will study various issues related to the Standardisation of Forensic Image and Video Enhancement (S-FIVE). The main focus of the project is oriented towards techniques that are used for improving the quality of surveillance video data and other types of images that portray persons and objects at the macroscopic level.
The S-FIVE project is a project funded by the European Commission through the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI) Monopoly 2011 programme "Improving Forensic Methodologies across Europe"(IFMAE).

The core S-FIVE project team is formed by researchers and investigators from BKA (Germany), CAST (UK), CSCP (Cyprus), MPS (UK), NFI (The Netherlands) and NICC-INCC (Belgium)."

As I'm filling out the survey, I could't help but remember the mantra from working with the SAPS in Pretoria - easy things should be easy. When the survey asked about difficulty, there wasn't a single question that I couldn't answer as "easy." For enhancement and analysis tasks, I use Amped's FIVE. Easy/simple things should be easy, and fast.

Here's the link to the survey: https://www.s-five.eu/limesurvey_9/index.php?sid=5