/Dashcam_Investigator

A desktop application to aid in the forensic investigation of evidence gathered from dashcam devices.

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

Dashcam Investigator

A python desktop application to aid in the forensic investigation of evidence gathered from dashcam devices.

Development

The project was built using Python 3.9 and uses Poetry for dependency management. Before getting started with development, install Poetry by following the instructions here

The following commands can be used to install the dependencies and run the application.

# Install dependencies
$ poetry install

# Run the application using the Poetry virtual environment
$ poetry run python ./dashcam_investigator/__main__.py

Dependencies

Software dependencies

The following software must be installed on the system where the application is executed.

  • ExifTool by Phil Harvey is used to extract metadata from video and image files to generate maps, timelines and other graphs. Exiftool is included in the archive presented on the Releases page of this project, however as long as exiftool is available on the PATH of the system, it should work as intended.
  • The application requires video codecs to be installed separately on the computer to support video playback. Please download and install the K-Lite Codec Pack to enable video playback.

Python Packages

The application was built using the following open source projects

  • PySide2 (Qt for Python, to build a GUI using Qt 5.15.2.1)
  • Pandas
  • Numpy
  • Black (code formatting)
  • PyTest (unit testing)
  • Filetype
  • gpxpy (To process GPX data)
  • folium (To create maps)
  • altair (To create declarative charts)
  • pyinstaller (To create executable binaries)

Application Configuration

Logging

The application uses Python's built in logging module for logging across the application. The module was configured to log DEBUG messages and higher to the console during development. In addition, the application writes the following logs to %LOCALAPPDATA%/DashcamInvestigator/Logs:

  • error.log - All ERROR and CRITICAL messages are written here.
  • debug.log - All DEBUG and higher events are written here. These logs also include the line and module where the log record was written.

Creating executables

The PyInstaller module is used to create execuable binaries of the application. Since the tool depends on exiftool and requires the presence of the gpx.fmt file to correctly process the GPX data, exiftool and gpx.fmt are included in the final build directory. The following command is used to run this action:

poetry run pyinstaller --clean --noconsole --add-data "gpx.fmt;." --add-data "log.conf;." --add-binary "exiftool.exe;." --name DashcamInvestigator .\dashcam_investigator\__main__.py