Visual Intelligence: Bringing Images into the Investigative Workflow

Screenshots, photographs, scanned documents, memes, infographics, video frames, and other visual content play a central role in how people communicate online. Industry research estimates that video accounts for approximately 82% of internet traffic [1], while more than 90% of internet users consume online video content on a regular basis.[2]

With so many investigative workflows built around text, this creates a growing intelligence gap for investigators and analysts.

Search results, alerts, watchlists, entity analytics, and reporting processes all depend on the ability to discover, retrieve, and analyze written information. Yet some of the most important signals increasingly appear visually: a screenshot shared in a messaging channel, a logo visible in the background of an image, a scanned document, a photograph of a location, or text embedded inside an image rather than written in a post.

The result is often a frustrating and time-consuming process. Analysts must open documents individually, inspect attached media manually, compare images with accompanying text, and determine which artifacts are relevant. At scale, that effort becomes difficult to sustain, increasing the risk that important context remains undiscovered.

The visual intelligence blind spot in investigations

Most organizations have become highly effective at searching text. They can locate names, keywords, locations, organizations, and communications in seconds.

Visual content is different.

Images often arrive as attachments, embedded objects, screenshots, or media files associated with broader collections of content. Even when those images contain relevant information, they frequently remain hidden inside documents that must be opened and reviewed one at a time.

The challenge extends beyond simply finding the images. Analysts and practitioners also need to understand what those images contain and how they relate to the broader investigation.

A photograph may reveal a location. A screenshot may contain critical text. An image may include a logo, a vehicle, a symbol, or other contextual clues that never appear in the accompanying written content. When visual and textual content remain disconnected, analysts are left reconstructing context manually.

Visual intelligence capabilities within Babel Street Insights

Babel Street makes media more accessible and actionable within Insights.

With a focus on media discovery and analysis, Insights offers a dedicated workspace that brings images, video frames, and audio files into a single view. Instead of opening document after document to determine whether relevant media exists, analysts can quickly review available media directly from search results and decide where to focus their attention.

Just as importantly, every media item remains connected to its source.

Analysts can move directly from a media item to the originating document, preserving the context necessary to understand how and why that content appeared. Rather than treating media as a disconnected artifact, Visual Intelligence helps keep visual and textual content linked throughout the investigative process.

Turning images into searchable intelligence

Finding relevant media is only part of the challenge.

Insights Visual Intelligence also offers image analysis capabilities designed to help analysts extract additional information from the images they uncover.

Analysts can apply multilingual OCR to surface text embedded in screenshots, photographs, and scanned documents. Object and category identification help highlight items that may be relevant to an investigation, while image descriptions provide additional context that can support review and triage. The resulting information can then be used to filter media collections and focus attention on the content most likely to matter.

This capability is particularly valuable in investigations where important information is communicated visually rather than textually. Instead of relying solely on what was written, investigators can begin incorporating signals contained within the image itself.

Built for investigative scale

Media analysis is most useful when it works at operational scale.

Visual Intelligence supports both point-of-need analysis and larger investigative workflows. Analysts can analyze individual images when deeper understanding is required or use the Analyze All Images workflow to process large collections, supporting jobs of up to 10,000 images.

The goal is not simply to analyze images — it is to reduce the burden of manual review while helping analysts integrate visual signals into the same workflow they already use for search, investigation, and assessment.

Bringing visual content into the investigative picture

The volume of visual content available to investigators will continue to grow. Images, screenshots, scanned documents, and video are increasingly where people share information, communicate ideas, and leave behind valuable signals.

Analysts cannot afford to treat that content as an afterthought.

Visual Intelligence helps close the gap by making media easier to discover, easier to understand, and easier to connect to the broader context of an investigation. By bringing images directly into the investigative workflow, analysts can spend less time hunting for visual signals and more time understanding what it means.