Forensics

Photo Analysis with Artificial Intelligence

Excire Forensics is a module integrated in X-Ways Forensics based on technology developed by Pattern Recognition Company GmbH. Excire currently provides these three distinct powerful capabilities in our software:

• It automatically analyzes photos and recognizes image content, objects like specific kinds buildings, vehicles, animals and plants, beaches, mountains, people of different ages, nudity and pornography, guns, drugs, text, ... (complete list). It also detects color themes and general photo properties, which are all described as keywords. You can focus on photos with particular relevant keywords (combined with AND or OR) or filter out photos with irrelevant keywords.

• It allows you to find photos that are “similar” from the perspective of an artificial intelligence to a collection of typical relevant photos from earlier cases or other photos that you provide (in JPEG, PNG, Bitmap, or TIFF format).

• It allows you to find faces of particular people in photos of new cases. (The application will require you to mark faces of interest in JPEG, PNG, Bitmap, or TIFF pictures.)

X-Ways Forensics processes pictures with Excire in one of the following formats: JPEG, PNG, Bitmap, TIFF, non-animated WEBP, GIF, HEIC.

Of great benefit for forensic investigators is that Excire works completely offline. Everything happens on your own machine. You don't need to trust any cloud service to which you would have to upload photos. No Internet connection is required, just like you know it from X-Ways Forensics.

The overall integration in X-Ways Forensics is seamless. You use the same operations as always (volume snapshot refinement) and the same filters that you already know (for report table associations or comments or metadata), and the results are stored in the volume snapshot or in evidence file containers. You can assign special cell colors in the directory browser to photos with keywords that are of particular interest to you.

Pictures can be automatically categorized as irrelevant or notable. In the extensive hierarchy of identifiable objects you can select individual objects or entire subtrees that render a picture irrelevant from your point of view with a high degree of certainty, such as any kinds of animals, plants, sports, musical instruments etc. You can also define what renders a picture notable for you, such as nudity ("act"), children, vehicles, text etc. "Notable" always overrides "irrelevant" when in doubt, if for example dogs are considered as important in a particular case, but animals otherwise are still marked as irrelevant. Logical AND combinations are supported when categorizing photos as notable. Some AND combinations are predefined that are meant to assist in child pornography investigations.

Keywords that describe photos are available in these languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Platform requirement: 64-bit Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022.