# Plug to Place: Indoor Multimedia Geolocation from Electrical Sockets for Digital Investigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16620 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16620/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Avoiding Overfitting: A Survey on Regularization Methods for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03299/) (2022)
- [Data-Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining: Prioritizing Data Quality over Quantity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12267/) (2024)
- [YOLO Evolution: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Architectural Review of YOLOv12, YOLO11, and Their Previous Versions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00201/) (2024)
- [Hotels-50K: A Global Hotel Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11397/) (2019)
- [The 2021 Hotel-ID to Combat Human Trafficking Competition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05746/) (2021)
- [Operations Research and Analytics to Combat Human Trafficking: A Systematic Review of Academic Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16476/) (2021)
- [DFRWS EU 10-Year Review and Future Directions in Digital Forensic Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11292/) (2023)
- [ODverse33: Is the New YOLO Version Always Better? A Multi Domain benchmark from YOLO v5 to v11](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14314/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer vision is a rapidly evolving field, giving rise to powerful new tools and techniques in digital forensic investigation, and shows great promise for novel digital forensic applications. One such application, indoor multimedia geolocation, has the potential to become a crucial aid for law enforcement in the fight against human trafficking, child exploitation, and other serious crimes. While outdoor multimedia geolocation has been widely explored, its indoor counterpart remains underdeveloped due to challenges such as similar room layouts, frequent renovations, visual ambiguity, indoor lighting variability, unreliable GPS signals, and limited datasets in sensitive domains. This paper introduces a pipeline that uses electric sockets as consistent indoor markers for geolocation, since plug socket types are standardised by country or region. The three-stage deep learning pipeline detects plug sockets (YOLOv11, mAP@0.5 = 0.843), classifies them into one of 12 plug socket types (Xception, accuracy = 0.912), and maps the detected socket types to countries (accuracy = 0.96 at >90% threshold confidence). To address data scarcity, two dedicated datasets were created: socket detection dataset of 2,328 annotated images expanded to 4,072 through augmentation, and a classification dataset of 3,187 images across 12 plug socket classes. The pipeline was evaluated on the Hotels-50K dataset, focusing on the TraffickCam subset of crowd-sourced hotel images, which capture real-world conditions such as poor lighting and amateur angles. This dataset provides a more realistic evaluation than using professional, well-lit, often wide-angle images from travel websites. This framework demonstrates a practical step toward real-world digital forensic applications. The code, trained models, and the data for this paper are available open source.