Accelerating Human Rights Investigations with Computer Vision

Adam Harvey, Hadi Khatib The Syrian Archive is a collective of
human rights activists dedicated to documenting human rights
violations and war crimes committed by all sides in the Syrian
conflict. Their network of researchers and journalists are
pioneering new methods for accountability and advocacy, which rely
on collecting, verifying, and annotating thousands of videos posted
online that contain evidence of human rights violations. But
manually reviewing these videos is expensive, does not scale, and
cause vicarious trauma. Currently there are over 1 million videos
waiting to be reviewed. The VFRAME computer vision toolkit is being
developed in collaboration with the Syrian Archive initiative to
improve their information gather capabilities. VFRAME can analyze
large-scale video datasets to locate illegal munitions (e.g.
cluster bombs, incendiary weapons, barrel bombs); filter graphic
content; and extract metadata about scenery, logos, and text. This
metadata is then made searchable through both text and visual
queries allowing the Syrian Archive to more quickly locate and
verify videos that contain evidence of war crimes and human rights
violations. This session will discuss and showcase how VFRAME and
the Syrian Archive initiative are working together to innovate new
tools and improve open source information gathering technology to
strengthen justice and advocacy efforts. https://vframe.io
https://syrianarchive.org