Digital-forensics based pattern recognition for discovering identities in electronic evidence

With the pervasiveness of computers and mobile devices, digital forensics becomes more important in law enforcement. Detectives increasingly depend on the scarce support of digital specialists which impedes efficiency of criminal investigations. This paper proposes and algorithm to extract, merge and rank identities that are encountered in the electronic evidence during processing. Two experiments are described demonstrating that our approach can assist with the identification of frequently occurring identities so that investigators can prioritize the investigation of evidence units accordingly