Automatically Finding Weapons in Social Media Images Part 1 by Justin Seitz.
From the post:
As part of my previous post on gangs in Detroit, one thing had struck me: there are an awful lot of guns being waved around on social media. Shocker, I know. More importantly I began to wonder if there wasn’t a way to automatically identify when a social media post has guns or other weapons contained in them. This post will cover how to use a couple of techniques to send images to the Imagga API that will automatically tag pictures with keywords that it feels accurately describe some of the objects contained within the picture. As well, I will teach you how to use some slicing and dicing techniques in Python to help increase the accuracy of the tagging. Keep in mind that I am specifically looking for guns or firearm-related keywords, but you can easily just change the list of keywords you are interested in and try to find other things of interest like tanks, or rockets.
This blog post will cover how to handle the image tagging portion of this task. In a follow up post I will cover how to pull down all Tweets from an account and extract all the images that the user has posted (something my students do all the time!).
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This rocks!
Whether you are trying to make contact with a weapon owner who isn’t in the “business” of selling guns or if you are looking for like-minded individuals, this is a great post.
Would make an interesting way to broadly tag images for inclusion in group subjects in a topic map, awaiting further refinement by algorithm or humans.
This is a great blog to follow: Automating OSINT.