An overview of NuDetective Forensic Tool and its usage to combat child pornography in Brazil

Abstract

In many countries, the possession of files containing child and teen pornography is a heinous crime and is desirable for law enforcement be able to detect such files in a timely manner at crime scenes. However, mainly at crime scenes, it is impossible to manually examine all files that can be stored in digital storage devices. The NuDetective Forensic Tool was developed to assist forensic examiners to identify child pornography at crime scenes. NuDetective uses automatic nudity detection in images and videos, file name comparison and also uses hash values to reduce the files to be analyzed by forensic examiners. Despite the high detection rates achieved in past experiments, the authors did not get any formal feedback of NuDetective users about its performance in real forensic cases. So, this work presents a detailed review of the four main features of NuDetective Forensic Tool, including all techniques and methods implemented, and also the results of an unpublished survey conducted to evaluate the real effectiveness of NuDetective by its Brazilian users. The results obtained showed that NuDetective is helping to arrest pedophiles and to combat the child sexual exploitation in the digital era.