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An e-government crowdsourcing framework: suspect investigation and identification


Purpose
The pervasiveness of mobile devices has led to the permanent use of their new features by the crowd to perform different tasks. The purpose of this paper is to exploit this massive consumption of new information technologies supported by the concept of crowdsourcing in a governmental context to access citizens as a source of ideas and support. The aim is to find out how crowdsourcing combined with the new technologies can constitute a great force to enhance the performance of the suspect investigation process.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper provides a structured view of a suspect investigation framework, especially based on the image processing techniques, including the automatic face analysis. This crowdsourcing framework is mainly based on the personal description as an identification technique to facilitate the suspect investigation and the use of MongoDB as a document-oriented database to store the information.


Findings
The case study demonstrates that the proposed framework provides satisfying results in each step of the identification process. The experimental results show how the combination between the crowdsourcing concept and the mobile devices pervasiveness has fruitfully strengthened the identification process with the use of automatic face analysis techniques.


Originality/value
A review of the literature has shown that previous work has focused mainly on the presentation of forensic techniques that can be used in the investigation process steps. However, this paper implements a complete framework whose whole strength is based on the crowdsourcing concept as a new paradigm used by institutions to solve many organizational problems.
