An Innovative Tool for Uploading/Scraping Large Image Datasets on Social
  Networks
Nicolò Fabio Arceri Oliver Giudice Sebastiano Battiato
Nowadays, people can retrieve and share digital information in an
increasingly easy and fast fashion through the well-known digital platforms,
including sensitive data, inappropriate or illegal content, and, in general,
information that might serve as probative evidence in court. Consequently, to
assess forensics issues, we need to figure out how to trace back to the posting
chain of a digital evidence (e.g., a picture, an audio) throughout the involved
platforms -- this is what Digital (also Forensics) Ballistics basically deals
with. With the entry of Machine Learning as a tool of the trade in many
research areas, the need for vast amounts of data has been dramatically
increasing over the last few years. However, collecting or simply find the
"right" datasets that properly enables data-driven research studies can turn
out to be not trivial in some cases, if not extremely challenging, especially
when it comes with highly specialized tasks, such as creating datasets analyzed
to detect the source media platform of a given digital media. In this paper we
propose an automated approach by means of a digital tool that we created on
purpose. The tool is capable of automatically uploading an entire image dataset
to the desired digital platform and then downloading all the uploaded pictures,
thus shortening the overall time required to output the final dataset to be
analyzed.