  The growing presence of devices carrying digital cameras, such as mobile
phones and tablets, combined with ever improving internet networks have enabled
ordinary citizens, victims of human rights abuse, and participants in armed
conflicts, protests, and disaster situations to capture and share via social
media networks images and videos of specific events. This paper discusses the
potential of images in human rights context including the opportunities and
challenges they present. This study demonstrates that real-world images have
the capacity to contribute complementary data to operational human rights
monitoring efforts when combined with novel computer vision approaches. The
analysis is concluded by arguing that if images are to be used effectively to
detect and identify human rights violations by rights advocates, greater
attention to gathering task-specific visual concepts from large-scale web
images is required.
