AI Knows What You Did Last Summer: Applications in Digital Forensics

The past decade saw an explosive advancement in smartphones and cameras, making them even more powerful and cheaper. As a result, not only can we record high-quality footage of the world around us, but their increased accessibility makes it rare that a significant event goes unnoticed. Furthermore, once something is captured, it can be uploaded instantly to social media and accessed by millions of people. Even though this connectivity has multiple positive effects, social media also raised new challenges in our society, such as the spread of fake news and misinformation. This scenario has created a range of new problems that Digital Forensics is concerned about, from analyzing major events in the world — such as, terrorist attempts, wars, and natural disasters — to understanding how these are perceived and discussed online. To cope with the scale of such problems, they are often approached by powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques developed during the last decades. This chapter presents modern applications of AI in the Digital Forensics field. Person re-identification (PReID), visual analytics, fact-checking, event filtering, and authorship attribution are just a few examples of forensic tasks that have been leveraged from recent advances in AI research in this new scenario. We discuss each task’s associated problems, challenges, current methods, and future research directions and hope to give the reader a general idea of the challenges of the field and its imperative demands for new tools and smart techniques to face the challenges of the 21st century.