November 17-18, 2020
The Final Conference of the VICTORIA project took place online from 16 to 18 November 2020 and was an opportunity to present the outcomes of the tools developed during the VICTORIA project. These tools aim to accelerate and improve the investigations of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) following major criminal acts and terrorist attacks. During the three-day programme, the VICTORIA consortium presented the Video Analysis Platform (VAP) that was built after 3 years of intensive research by the 14 VICTORIA partners. The conference was also a chance for discussion about the future of security innovation in industry and in the European research community.
The first day of the conference focused on the LEAs' needs. According to Europol, the key requirements for video analysis tools are preserving the evidentiary value of content, as well as compliance with data retention policy across member states. A VAP live demonstration followed, which covered all integrated modules from the technical partners to show how VAP could help LEAs for investigation. The first day ended with feedback from LEAs that participated in field trials of the VAP.
A more technical introduction of the VICTORIA project tools took place on second day and included the 4D (3D+time) crime scene reconstruction, the audio functionalities demonstration, and the data generation (video footage generation and synthetic video). In addition, a number of security-related projects, such as ILEAnet, ASGARD, MAGNETO, and SPIA-VA, were presented in order to provide an overview of other security initiatives. The day ended with discussions on the target objectives of the VICTORIA online community of Video Analysis For Investigation (VAFI), the business plans for exploitation, and initiatives for standardization.
The project VICTORIA delivered an ethical and legally video analysis platform with the goal to accelerate the video analysis tasks of LEA. Regarding data protection and privacy, the conference affirmed during the last the regulatory framework for video analysis in the EU. More specifically, an overview of how VICTORIA addressed legal and ethical issues related to data protection, non-discrimination, and power asymmetries in the development of the VAP were presented by analyzing the design of the approach and the dedicated toolkit for LEAs. The VICTORIA virtual conference concluded with a demonstration of the training module for the end-users.