Tag Archive: video verification

InVID plugin surpassed 3000 downloads

InVID plugin surpassed 3000 downloads

We are very pleased to announce that our free plugin that supports video verification has surpassed 3.000 downloads. The functionalities of this integrated toolbox for content verification are now widely used by journalists, experts of the human rights community, and others dealing with video verification.

We thank all users and supporters of this technology and we promise to make it even better! Would you like to help us on this? Then, simply take the survey and give us feedback about the tool!

If you haven’t discovered the tool yet, get it for free from: http://www.invid-project.eu/verify

Survey about the InVID Verification Plugin

Survey about the InVID Verification Plugin

The InVID plugin now with a new launch menu and extended functionalities

New release of InVID Verification Plugin

Check the new version of the InVID plugin (released on January 31st 2018) that contains a new launch menu and extended functionalities for content collection and verification. After fixing a number of bugs, and thanks to the valuable and constructive feedback from the users of the tool, we developed the next version of the InVID verification plugin, which:

  • Contains a new launch popup menu with three options (see image on the right):
    • “Open InVID” opens the user interface of the plugin in a new tab of the browser
    • “Video Urls” allows journalists to identify the video URL in the HTML code of the webpage, open it a new tab that enables the direct download of the video or use it for analysing the video through the Keyframe component of the tool (supports Instagram, Vimeo and Liveleak platforms)
    • “Images Urls” gathers all the existing images in the webpage and permits a more organised inspection of these images through the offered functionalities in the contextual menu of the InVID plugin (supports Instagram, Vimeo and Liveleak platforms)

An example of how the URL of an Instagram video can be retrieved using the newly added functionality is illustrated in the following image.

  • Supports YouTube shorteners in the entire set of integrated video analysis functionalities
  • Offers an enhanced contextual menu
  • Includes the latest version of the Metadata component, that offers a preview of the picture and supports Dropbox and Google drive URLs
  • Integrates the latest version of the Analysis component, which now supports Twitter content and provides a link to timeanddate.com for direct convertion to local time
  • Offers Tineye as an alternative reverse search engine, in all tabs where this searching process is applicable

Get the Chrome- and Firefox-compatible versions of this release, from http://www.invid-project.eu/verify and send us your feedback!

More than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin

More than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin

We are thrilled to inform you that there are now more than 1000 users of the InVID verification plugin! And lots of content that has been processed over the last months for debunking fake news!

We are inviting every single user to take the survey and give us feedback about the tool! Then, we promise to make it even better!

If you haven’t discovered the tool yet, get it for free from: http://www.invid-project.eu/verify

Survey about the InVID Verification Plugin

Take the survey about the verification plugin and help us improve the tool!

InVID at World Digital Content and IFRA Expo

InVID at World Digital Content and IFRA Expo

During three days, InVID project was demoed by Gerhard Rudinger (APA-IT) and Denis Teyssou (AFP) in the startup space of the World Digital Content and IFRA Expo in Messe Berlin, the traditional yearly event of the press and publishing industry organized by WAN-IFRA, the World association of newspapers and publishers.

The event was the occasion to showcase the InVID project and the InVID Verification Plugin (a.k.a. “Fake video news debunker”) to executives from media houses like News UK (“The Times”, “The Sun”, “Sunday Times”), Kyodo News (Japan), Roularta (Belgium), German newspapers and so on.

InVID was also presented on the main conference stage in the panel “Preparing for the 2020s”, where Denis Teyssou demonstrated the InVID Verification Plugin in front of more than 100 media professionals (see indicative images below):

  1. on a Russian video re-used out of context to create a xenophobic climate during the French presidential election;
  2. on the Eduardo Martins fake war photographer affair, with a new feature aiming to detect pictures which have been mirrored;
  3. on a North Korea picture which shows evidence to have been tampered.
Mr. Denis Teyssou from AFP, demonstrating the InVID Verification Plugin in the

Mr. Denis Teyssou demonstrating the InVID Verification Plugin to the participants of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.

Indicative view of the audience

Indicative view of the audience of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.

The given presentation can be seen in the following:

In summary, the WAN-IFRA event was a very good opportunity to disseminate the InVID results and to raise awareness about the InVID project. Amid a general concern about fake news, the project attracted attention and was highlighted by WAN-IFRA on its editor’s blog: https://blog.wan-ifra.org/2017/10/12/publishers-share-fact-checking-tools-and-initiatives-to-restore-trust-in-media

New release of InVID Verification Plugin

New release of InVID Verification Plugin

A new release of InVID verification plugin was made on October 3, 2017. This new updated version of the tool contains the following features.

  • A permanent feedback mechanism that allows our users to get in contact with us in order to share how they use the tool, problems they may have, questions about the applied analysis, as well as ideas for future improvements.
The feedback mechanism of the InVID Verification Plugin

The feedback mechanism of the InVID Verification Plugin

  • A survey to gather the users’ opinion about the plugin; this survey takes only a few minutes to complete and it will help us to provide you with better tools!
The integrated survey about the use of the InVID Verification Plugin

The integrated survey about the use of the InVID Verification Plugin

  • A new filter that allows users to deal with fake mirrored images. The case of the fake war photographer Eduardo Martins which was reported in early September 2017 puts in evidence that reverse image search engines often fail to detect mirrored images. This use case gave us the idea to propose a tool to overcome such fake images. In the Magnifier feature, there is now a flip filter that allows you to mirror the image before sending it to Google Images. The generated mirrored image can be also downloaded to the user’s PC. See the example bellow and watch the video tutorial on the InVID channel, to see how to proceed.
Magnifier tool for image mirroring

Magnifier tool for image mirroring

  • Finally, the same Magnifier feature now support links to images stored in Dropbox and Google Drive (please make sure to have a link ending with “view?usp=sharing”).

Get the latest version of the InVID Verification Plugin from here!

InVID at FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress 2017

InVID at FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress 2017

The theme for the 2017 FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress, to be held in Berlin from 04-06 October 2017, will be Media Intelligence and the New Paradigm of Brand Communication, including a special session on “How to Analyze in an Alternative Facts World”.

Prof. Arno Scharl from webLyzard technology will present results of the InVID project as part of his keynote presentation on “Automated Rumor Detection and Visualization”, with a special focus on the project’s prototypical applications – the InVID Verification App, the InVID Verification Plugin, and the InVID Visual Analytics Dashboard including its real-time story detection and streamgraph visualization components (see also https://invid.weblyzard.com).

The InVID technologies at ACM Multimedia 2017

The InVID technologies at ACM Multimedia 2017

The InVID technologies for media discovery and verification will be presented at the ACM Multimedia Conference 2017 that will take place on October 23-27, 2017, at Mountain View, CA USA.

Dr. Lyndon Nixon from MODUL Technology GmbH will present the latest developments of the InVID project on detecting news stories from Twitter streams and using those stories to collect automatically relevant videos from social networks. Specifically, Dr. Nixon will address the need to first find good candidate videos from the haystack of social networks and explain how the InVID Dashboard (see screenshot below) can be used to browse news stories and relevant video posted about those stories, helping journalists more easily identify candídates for verification.

Screenshot of the developed InVID Dashboard

Screenshot of the developed InVID Dashboard

Following, Dr. Vasileios Mezaris from Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas will focus on the necessity to evaluate the trustworthiness of user-generated videos published on social networks, aiming either to verify their authenticity and veracity or to debunk fake videos. In this context, Dr. Mezaris will demonstrate the use and functionality of the InVID Verification Plugin (see screenshot below) for assessing the reliability of a user-generated video, by investigating the originality, the contextual information, the existence of potential tampering, and the relation to other newsworthy videos.

Screenshot of the Magnifier tool of the developed InVID Verification Plugin

Screenshot of the Magnifier tool of the developed InVID Verification Plugin

These talks will be part of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Verification that will be held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia Conference 2017.

 

InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators

On 5th October 2017, Dr Lyndon Nixon will represent InVID at Investors Meeting for Media Innovators organised by the Support Action I3. Bringing together EU research projects from the ICT-19 call, media startups and investors, Dr Nixon will be available to demonstrate and explain InVID’s unique toolkit for verifying online video, starting with a media collection pipeline through annotation and analysis to forensic analysis. The media discovery and verification functionalities are intuitively put into the hands of journalists, news editors and other media professionals through a browser-based Dashboard, a Verification Plug-in and a Verification Application.

In the one day event, InVID hopes to learn more about how its innovative services and tools could be used to support other media startups (also outside of the verification domain) as well as understand what investment opportunities exist for future sustainability and exploitation of InVID project results.

The InVID Verification App in the Innovation Radar Prize 2017 of the EU Commission

The InVID Verification App has been short-listed for the Innovation Radar Prize 2017 of the EU Commission. The Innovation Radar initiative of the European Commission is actively identifying high potential EU-funded innovations and innovators and seeking to help them get their innovation “out of the lab” and into (or at least closer to) the market.

This application has been developed by Condat, to support journalists during the verification of user-generated videos. It integrates several tools and services of project partners CERTH, MODUL, EXO MAKINA and UdL, that allow the user to analyse the source, content, location, date and rights of the video, and relies on domain knowledge of project partners AFP and DW. Further details about this technology can be found here.

It would be great, if you could help us to improve the chances of the InVID Verification App to win the Innovation Radar Prize by VOTING here: https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/tech-society/condat

Screenshot of the InVID Verification App, showing the different tools for assessing the authenticity and veracity user-generated videos.