Open questions for Bellingcat technical contributors

These are difficult, long-term projects that would contribute to open source investigations at Bellingcat and for other investigators around the world. If you are interested in working on these topics, Bellingcat can help connect you with technical resources.

Assisted or semi-automated terrain perspective match

From a photograph containing topographic features, can the location and view angle be determined?

• Topographic features could be traced from the image manually.
• An approximate geographic bounding box could be required to constrain the search space.

Electrical network frequency analysis

Create an open source package for chrono-locating a audio/video source by matching electrical network frequency variations (from low frequency hums in source audio) with recorded variations in a grid frequency database (i.e. https://osf.io/m43tg/). This is theoretically possible (many IEEE articles about it) and reportedly in use by state-level justice entities, but is it practical for the OSINT hobbyist? To our knowledge, no one has publicly developed a public, non-academic proof-of-concept of this.