mtriage is a command-line application that can be used to scrape and analyse media. mtriage is developed by Forensic Architecture, and is intended for use by open source research agencies, journalists, and activists.
mtriage consists of two types of components:
- selectors: to search for and download media from various platforms.
- analysers: to derive data from media that has been retrieved by a selector.
Below are the following components that are supported. If you are interested in helping us to develop additional selectors and analysers, please consider joining the conversaton on Discord.
- youtube - search by query with optional date range (time uploaded), download video and metadata.
- twitter - search by query, download tweets and images.
- local - use media that already exists on your filesystem.
- frames - extract frames from videos as images.
- yolov3 - detect and classify objects in images using YoloV3 trained on ImageNet classes.
- keras_pretrained - classify objects in images using Resnet50 trained on ImageNet.
- ocr - analyse an image using optical character recognition from Google Cloud Platform.
mtriage is currently in active development, and is not yet packaged in any way. It uses Docker to manage dependencies, which you will need to download to ensure mtriage works as expected.
Follow the instructions relevant to your operating system to install Docker CE.
You also need to ensure that a version of Python is installed on your computer. Most modern operating systems have a version installed by default.
Depending on what components you intend to use, there may be additional setup required. Ensure to read the documentation for each component you wish to use.
Once you have Docker and Python installed, you can run mtriage using one of the examples provided. From this folder:
pip install -r requirements.txt
./mtriage run examples/_demo/youtube.yaml When you first run mtriage, it will download the necessary Docker images to your system. The first time you run it, it may take several minutes to get up and running. Subsequent uses will be much faster.