D -- Video and Image System for Investigation on Networks (VISION)

The General Services Administration, Center for Information tems Security Services is requesting interested parties to provide a brief technical solution and rough order of magnitude for the following: 1.1 Objective The objective of this task is to design and test a VISION (Video and Image System for Investigation on Networks) prototype. The working prototype system should be able to analyze pictures and videos from large data sets, individual cases, or the Internet, to reduce forensic examiners processing times in conducting forensic media analysis. The client is seeking an industry partner/partners that can provide the capabilities required for the processing of digital pictures and/or video. The Industry Partner(s) that has the capability to perform digital pictures and/or video analysis shall be evaluated for what they are capable of performing and not be automatically eliminated because they can not accomplish all functions in this SOW. 1.2 Environment The prototype system, that is to be designed, will work as an independent system architecture during its integration, test, and evaluation phases. The prototype, once operational, would be incorporated into a legacy system consisting of Windows 2000 servers (soon to be moving to Windows 2003 Servers Enterprise Edition) and Personal Computers running Windows 2000 Workstation operating system. 2.0 SCOPE This SOW defines the tasks and managerial requirements of the industry partner to design, integrate, and test a VISION prototype. The VISION prototype system will consist of the integration of hardware, software packages (COTS), and processes developed to support investigations involving images (digital pictures) and video. The prototype, 1/16-scale of the eventual system, will be used as a test bed to research and develop new techniques for the eventual operational system. Prototype testing will determine the best processes from each Software package to be leveraged against the problem set from a repository of data, information from individual cases, or information from the Internet. The industry partner(s) shall also provide support services that encompass recommendations for technical, logistical, and life cycle support for the VISION prototype to the client’s program office. 3.0 TASKS The industry partner(s) shall assist with the implementation, management, and administration of the tasks identified in this Section and Section 4. The industry partner shall ensure that all work is performed in accordance with this SOW, the applicable task order and its delivery schedule, including ensuring that task order cost and labor hour estimates are not exceeded during work performance. In the following subsections the required software and its’ integration will be identified: 3.1 General The industry partner(s) shall integrate their specific software into hardware provided by the Government, and work with the On-Site Task Manager (OTM) or their designated representative to design, implement, and test the prototype system that will attend to all or part of the details identified in Section 3 of this SOW to meet the performance specifications. The software integration (initial phase) to include: installation, evaluation, and testing by the industry partner should be completed within 12 weeks of contract award. Additionally, the Industry Partner(s) must be willing to work with other Industry Partners that may be awarded a portion of this task order as well as the Industry Partner that maintains the current network systems and applications. The industry partner(s) shall provide a general program management and system integration plan and participate in working groups with other industry partners in the form of Technical Interchange Meetings (TIM). 3.2 Program Management The industry partner shall provide all the necessary personnel, software, and technologies required to conduct the tasks detailed throughout this SOW. The industry partner shall manage the technical, cost, schedule, and security aspects of all work performed in response to this SOW. Management efforts shall ensure successful fulfillment of all contractual requirements. The industry partner shall provide a dedicated Program Manager (PM) with direct access to senior corporate managers. The PM shall be granted responsibility and authority to control of all aspects of the VISION prototype that pertains to their specific software package to ensure successful contract completion. The industry partner's PM shall be the primary Point of Contact (POC) to the client’s program office. The PM shall be responsible for planning, in coordination with the client, all aspects of the system prototype (development, integration, and testing) that pertains to their specific software package. Detailed scheduling tools shall be employed to adequately and effectively plan, manage and communicate sufficient details to ensure successful program execution. To meet the Government’s objective, the industry partner will target 4 months after date of award as the date that all technology is to be integrated, successfully tested and that any development is completed, including supporting documentation, and that the training, technical support center, and Life Cycle Support requirements are in place, in order to meet the operational objectives of VISION prototype. The industry partner shall prepare and submit monthly Program Status Reports. The Program Status Reports shall contain, as a minimum, the following information: Program Manager's Summary Summary of Data Submissions Technical Summary Systems/Software/Testing Overview Subsystem/Integration/testing Status Progress achieved Meeting Summaries Risk Mitigation Status and Plans to mitigate these issues Problems/Issues/Concerns Plans (next month, next phase, etc.) Schedules (e.g. Gantt, Pert) Action Item Status Financial Report including spend rate 3.2.1 System Documentation The industry partner(s) shall provide configuration control of all computer systems. The industry partner(s) shall control and provide to the government all of the documents required to operate the client’s computer systems that will be a part of the prototype. The industry partner(s) shall provide the government with comprehensive documentation to show the use and relationship of the software applications and hardware configurations and that the system meets the client’s DoD Information Assurance Policies. 3.3 System Design, Integration, and Support The industry partner(s) shall develop the documentation to reflect the VISION prototype design, configuration, and interfaces. The industry partner(s) shall work with the client’s engineers to establish and maintain the VISION prototype baseline. The industry partner(s) shall support TIM to develop, analyze, and document this baseline. The industry partner(s) shall develop mechanisms to trace where specific requirements are satisfied. The industry partner(s) shall provide analysis to evaluate the baseline against any proposed changes. The industry partner(s) shall perform those tasks, actions, and activities needed to ensure the VISION prototype will satisfy the Government's needs including: requirements validation, system integration, configuration management, operations verification, systems support, and training. The industry partner(s) shall provide consultation, studies, and writing (presenting technical memoranda and white papers) as required by the client. 3.3.1 Understanding System Requirements The industry partner(s) shall ensure that requirements are clear, verifiable, and consistent with the objectives for maximum use of commercial off the shelf products. If the industry partner determines that a non-commercial component, protocol or standard is necessary, they shall fully define the requirements for that component or sub-system and any other element needed and coordinate with Contract Office Technical Representative (COTR) before proceeding with implementing the solution. 3.3.2 System Support The industry partner shall provide as part of the overall service contract system software evaluation support during software integration, test, and evaluation. Once initial phase is completed the industry partner must provide a software engineer or other appropriate industry partner representative to provide a minimum of 10 hours per month in support of the evaluation and testing phases of the industry partner’s software solution by the client or their appointed representative, this period will last the remaining nine months of the contract. 3.4 Detail Tasks 3.4.1 Project Plan The Industry partner shall establish, maintain, and control a detailed schedule that shows the order in which work will take place, including identification of major events and milestones and shall cover the period of performance (POP). The schedule shall also coordinate with the deliverables established in this SOW. The schedule shall include: • Engineering activities including integration reviews and TIMs • Software integration • External dependencies • Testing • Documentation The Industry partner shall provide the client with a schedule and cost impact of any changes that the industry partner feels need to be made to the contract to meet all deliverables identified in this SOW. 3.4.2 Software 3.4.2.1 Examination of Large Datasets: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to examine large datasets (to be determined) from a database, and enable users to send a large number (to be determined) of queries. The datasets that the software must be able to examine will be from images or video. The system should be based on distributable components that can stand on a cluster of machines. The software should be capable to scale up to evaluate at least 3 million images and 500,000 queries within a period of 24 hours. The number of images that the system can hold or access should be only restricted by the hardware that it resides on. Additionally, the system should be able to have automated queries sent to the system, generate reports, and give users access and use of any produced reports. 3.4.2.2 Examine Individual Pieces of Media: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to store and retrieve all individual images or videos to or from a repository (server/database.) All of the digital data (images and video) should be available for viewing and examination during the time of capture for matching against a set of known information (i.e., previous stored digital images and query criteria). All digital data collected is required to be maintained in their original form for future analysis and processing. 3.4.2.3 Identify and Segregate Images in all Formats: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to segregate images into different categories and all formats currently available and have the ability to add formats as they become available, using tools such as standard libraries for image format decompression. 3.4.2.4 Identify and Segregate Videos in all Digitized Formats: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to review and decompress digital video file formats. The software will identify transitions in videos and produce thumbnails of any video format that it reviews. The system should support all current video formats. Have the ability to except new video codec when released, by installing a new codec on the client machine, and should be able to use it to read the new video files. 3.4.2.5 Perform required analysis: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to review one or more image(s) against the repository (i.e., 500,000 images) of images in less than five (5) seconds. Additionally, the system should be able to increase the access timeliness as hardware configurations are enhanced when the system is moved to the completed deployable stage. 3.4.2.6 Download target sets from the Internet (Robot): The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to support a web crawler and extraction of objects from targeted websites. And can be plugged into systems using integration such as API calls, so that crawled images are either matched against a reference database, or downloaded to a local repository. 3.4.2.7 Train Software to Identify Targets: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system that will have the ability to be trained to identify target images by recognizing content or specific target matching. The learning processes should be available to advance users who control the software setup or can be provided by the software vendor. 3.4.2.8 Specific target matching: The industry partner shall integrate a software system that should be able to recognize content of images on a sample-by-sample basis and adding images to a reference list of "suspect images". The system should also be able to recognize the image even if it has been modified with captions, re-encoding, cropping, color transforms, pixelization, blurring, resizing, deforming, and any other standard Photoshop like image manipulation. 3.4.2.9 Image classification: The industry partner shall integrate a system to be trained to identify categories that have been determined by the user(s), possibly using a selected set of samples to compute a "profile" of a category. The system should be able to use these categories to reduce the known images that have been reviewed in the past. 3.4.2.10 Identify Like Images: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system required to identify the similarity between two images. The source of the images can be from video thumbnails or other still images. Additionally, the range of similarity between two images should be available to the user to show how the images differ. 3.4.2.11 Identify Like People: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to identify similarities in images of people (i.e., facial hair and/or headdress), not specific facial recognition. 3.4.2.12 Search Region of Images: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to search for a specific region of an image as specified by a user. The software should give a user the ability to identify any image in a given repository and search on any part of that image in the complete database of images. 3.4.2.13 Exclude from Search: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to exclude region(s) of a given image from a search as specified by the user. This should work similar to the “NOT” function used in a Boolean logic query. 3.4.2.14 Review Embedded Files in PowerPoint Slides: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to conduct string searches within embedded files (i.e., PDF and word documents) that are images within PowerPoint slides and not readily accessible in this format. Additionally, the software should be able to scan for the same information in a thumbnail image produce from a video stream. 3.4.2.15 Identify like Images (i.e., text or backgrounds): The industry partner shall integrate software for this system that can be searched and retrieved based on any text that has been associated with the image or the content of the image itself. The software should allow a user to use a sample image or text string as search evidence to return a list of similar or identical characteristics. 3.4.2.16 Search for strings in multiple languages: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system giving user(s) the ability to search for strings in multiple languages (i.e., Arabic, Korean, Russian, and other languages) within images and thumbnails produce from streaming video. The software should allow user(s) to make queries in English language and the search be conducted against non-English languages data. 3.4.2.17 Identify Pornography from non- Pornography Images categories: The industry partner shall integrate software for this system to classify digital images according to "categories". Each category should be able to be defined by a "profile". Profiles should be predefined by the software supplier and/or built by the user(s) on an as needed bases. Additionally, the software should be able to scan for the same information in a thumbnail image produce from a video stream. 3.4.2.18 Identify, Search, and Extract Metadata: The industry partner shall provide as part of their software capability have tools to identify, search, and extract metadata from images or information known about the image (i.e., data providing for a page-turning function, or data allowing linkage to encoded text, embedded image, audio or video files, or any other type of resource having its own structure of complex parts, etc.) The metadata could be used to do this by identifying different characteristics of the information resource, to include the intellectual content and digital representation data of the image if available. Please send all responses in an electronic format to Howard B.Parker [email protected] and Donald Carlson [email protected] If you have any question, please call Howard Parker at 202-401-7139.