Classifying suspicious content in tor darknet through Semantic Attention Keypoint Filtering

[EN] One of the tasks Law Enforcement Agencies are responsible for is to find evidence of criminal activities in the Darknet. However, visiting thousands of domains to locate visual information containing illicit acts manually requires a considerable amount of time and human resources. To support th...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fidalgo Fernández, Eduardo, Alegre Gutiérrez, Enrique, Fernández Robles, Laura, González Castro, Víctor
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universidad de León
Repositorio:BULERIA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de León
OAI Identifier:oai:buleria.unileon.es:10612/23155
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10612/23155
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Informática
Ingeniería de sistemas
Artificial intelligence
Digital investigation
Tor darknet
Cybercrime analysis
Image classification
Bag of visual words
Saliency map
1209.03 Análisis de Datos
1203.04 Inteligencia Artificial
2209.90 Tratamiento Digital. Imágenes
1203.12 Bancos de Datos
3304.05 Sistemas de Reconocimiento de Caracteres
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] One of the tasks Law Enforcement Agencies are responsible for is to find evidence of criminal activities in the Darknet. However, visiting thousands of domains to locate visual information containing illicit acts manually requires a considerable amount of time and human resources. To support this task, in this paper, we explore the automatic classification of images uploaded to Tor darknet. Unfortunately, the foreground objects on such images are not always presented standalone, without background, due to the environmental conditions. To address this challenge on the digital investigation of Tor darknet visual content, we propose to classify automatically only relevant parts of the image combining saliency maps, i.e. to select the regions with the most salient information, with Bag of Visual Words (BoVW). We introduce Semantic Attention Keypoint Filtering (SAKF), a filtering strategy that removes non-significant features at a pixel level that mainly do not belong to the object of interest or foreground. We assessed SAKF on seven publicly available datasets, obtaining from 1.64 to 15.73 points higher accuracies than the method set as the baseline, i.e. BoVW using dense SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) descriptors. We also compared SAKF filtering performance against the deep features extracted from two well-known Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, namely MobileNet and ResNet50. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach and highlight that the use of automatic image classification could be advantageous to support daily Law Enforcement Agencies investigations on Tor darknet. Graphical abstract