Authentication of Video Evidence for Forensic Investigation: A Case of Nigeria

Abstract

Video shreds of evidence are usually admissible in the court of law all over the world. However, individuals manipulate these videos to either defame or incriminate innocent people. Others indulge in video tampering to falsely escape the wrath of the law against misconducts. One way impostors can forge these videos is through inter-frame video forgery. Thus, the integrity of such videos is under threat. This is because these digital forgeries seriously debase the credibility of video contents as being definite records of events. This leads to an increasing concern about the trustworthiness of video contents. Hence, it continues to affect the social and legal system, forensic investigations, intelligence services, and security and surveillance systems as the case may be. The problem of inter-frame video forgery is increasingly spontaneous as more video-editing software continues to emerge. These video editing tools can easily manipulate videos without leaving obvious traces and these tampered videos become viral. Alarmingly, even the beginner users of these editing tools can alter the contents of digital videos in a manner that renders them practically indistinguishable from the original content by mere observations. This paper, however, leveraged on the concept of correlation coefficients to produce a more elaborate and reliable inter-frame video detection to aid forensic investigations, especially in Nigeria. The model employed the use of the idea of a threshold to efficiently distinguish forged videos from authentic videos. A benchmark and locally manipulated video datasets were used to evaluate the proposed model. Experimentally, our approach performed better than the existing methods. The overall accuracy for all the evaluation metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision and F1-score was 100%. The proposed method implemented in the MATLAB programming language has proven to effectively detect inter-frame forgeries.