SOCIS: Scene of crime information system

The scene of a crime will always contain forensic evidence with clues relating to the victim and the perpetrator of the crime. Documenting the evidence is a highly skilled task performed by dedicated officers. Information collected at the scene is subsequently used by a number of individuals and organisations, including forensic scientists.

Accurate recall of this information is crucial to the administration of justice. A scene of crime officer sees much more at the scene of a crime than may be apparent in a image of the same, and he or she can articulate this information at the scene.

SOCIS is a prototype R&D project set within a real application of considerable social importance, and which integrates a number of relatively mature research technologies to ask new questions. Most importantly, it asks whether a large complex computer data base of arbitrary objects can be populated from multimedia derived features (speech, transcribed language, digitised images etc) so as to enable the retrieval of digitised images in response to queries made by a range of interested parties.

SOCIS will integrate off the shelf digital camera and speech recognition technologies to automate the hands-free collection and storage of images alongside verbatim commentaries (collateral texts) about images.