TraffickCam: Explainable Image Matching For Sex Trafficking Investigations
This work addresses the need for more effective and interpretable tools in law enforcement to combat sex trafficking, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing machine learning approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of matching hotel room images to aid sex trafficking investigations by improving an end-to-end system for better performance, explainable visualizations, and exportable results.
Investigations of sex trafficking sometimes have access to photographs of victims in hotel rooms. These images directly link victims to places, which can help verify where victims have been trafficked or where traffickers might operate in the future. Current machine learning approaches give promising results in image search to find the matching hotel. This paper explores approaches to make this end-to-end system better support government and law enforcement requirements, including improved performance, visualization approaches that explain what parts of the image led to a match, and infrastructure to support exporting the results of a query.