AP Legal, Forensic and Intellectual Property has recently completed some exciting and compelling analysis of data from both consumer and industrial vehicle telemetry/video recording devices (frequently called “Black Boxes” or “DashCams”).
Telemetry recording devices can be an extremely valuable piece of evidence in the event of a catastrophic event like a crash or other vehicular incident. Low-end units might only record the view out the front of the vehicle along with the time and date. While this alone can be highly important in reconstructing the event, higher-end units may record GPS position and speed, accelerometer G-force (shock/impact) readings, throttle and brake inputs and may also incorporate multiple channels of video including rear-view and interior/driver video. This auxiliary data can indicate whether the driver was distracted, drowsy or otherwise incapacitated. Interior audio channels may also give clues about comments and audible distractions.
Most systems use an onboard SD card or SSD (Solid State Drive), which are storage technologies with no moving parts that are very robust in case of a crash. Many professional systems use wireless infrastructure to frequently upload event data to secure offsite servers for data protection, provenance and chain of evidence purposes. The data in question may have encryption and digital signature techniques applied to prevent tampering.
AP Legal Forensic and Intellectual Property has analyzed data such as this to extract additional unfiltered data, recover first-generation (non-recoded) audio and video streams and export location, speed and force data for mapping and graphing.
At times, we have found it necessary to decompile, reverse engineer and decrypt uncooperative data sources and create specialized tools for analyzing and exporting such data.
Notable companies making dashcam/telemetry/telematics/blackbox units like these are Janus Cam, the G1W series, Vision Hawk, Mobile Devices, BlackboxGuard, Garmin, SmartDrive, Kytx DriveCam, Ventra and others.
Contact us if you need help analyzing or interpreting data from a Telematics/DashCam/BlackBox vehicle system.