Introduction to Digital Forensics/Image investigations

One of the most common aspects of any digital forensic investigation is that of image forensics. It is an unavoidable fact that one of the most common crimes looked at within the field is that of child pornography, but beyond that images can have a number of evidential uses in other settings.

For example, we previously discussed how some browsers store thumbnails of visited sites, useful to proving what a user saw on their screen. With the Google Chrome browser this can sometimes amount to many hundreds of images to work through, this is the inherent disadvantage introduced by image analysis; there tends to be a lot of them. A basic installation of Windows, for example, could contain thousands of images and just one computer game tens of thousands. Finding ways to process and filter relevant images in bulk is one of the foremost issues in digital forensics.