Glimpse
Glimpse is a computer vision-powered tool that detects violence in large video datasets to power human rights investigations.
Challenge
As camera phones, body-worn cameras, and drones become more commonplace, human rights advocates, journalists, and citizens are increasingly using video to capture human and civil rights violations.
This presents the human rights community with an unprecedented opportunity for justice and an unprecedented challenge – how do you identify evidence that’s buried in an endless stream of content? For journalists, lawyers, and human rights investigators, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack
Solution
Glimpse is a cutting-edge, AI-powered tool that detects, categorizes and quantifies violent actions, objects, and sounds buried in large video archives.
This saves investigators the time and emotional trauma they would otherwise suffer through manually watching videos. It was originally developed in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong to help archivists catalog the millions of crowd-sourced videos that had been captured by brave citizens, activists and journalists.
Use Case: Investigating Peruvian State Violence Human Rights Watch published a report documenting the excessive use of force, violence and killings by Peru’s security forces against largely rural workers and Indigenous people.
Forty-nine protesters and bystanders, including 8 children, were killed and an additional 1,300 injured during the protests that occurred between December 2022 through February 2023. As part of that investigation, there were 37 hours of video footage captured. Human Rights Watch used the MVP of Glimpse, to analyze video and audio data from the protests. This saved investigators countless hours and identified the moments that matter buried in hours of documentation.
The Lab is seeking additional funding to develop this promising piece of technology into a commercial-grade, standalone product for investigators, journalists and lawyers around the world.
With this investment, we believe that Glimpse can begin to generate the revenue it needs to sustain itself in the long-term and become a critical resource at the center of every war crimes investigation now and in the future. For a detailed proposal, please contact us.
