COVER STORY Tattoo Recognition Becomes Mainstream
ferent tattoos, with the same characteristics being picked up by the software. Text fi lters can help address this.
Bedroom 4 Cropped Scorpion Claws Right
In many instances, only part of the tattoo may be visible. The example here is an extreme case of this, where only the tips of the scorpion’s claws are visible. Again the small partial ‘probe’ image is on the right, and thumbnails of the matching images above the user-defi ned threshold are displayed on the left. In this example, only one of the images in the database matches the probe above the threshold of 87 percent—that of Duane Berlitz at 90 percent. In some cases, the shot of the tattoo may have no boundaries at all,
so the system has no information on which to match its position. How- ever, this can still work, as in the example of a tattoo of a tiger here:
required fi elds, i.e., the tattoo image, its description (if this ex- ists), and the name of the offender. Once this is done, all the tattoos in the database can be au- tomatically encoded. When this is completed, the tattoos are ready to be searched. So law enforcement gains substantial ad- ditional benefi t from data already held in the records system, without anything else having to be added. The tattoos in the existing offender database are accessed
in read-only mode, so data integrity is assured. New images added to the database can be automatically detected without any notifi cation from the host application, so the developer of the records system doesn’t have to modify their software to notify the tattoo recognition system every time a new tattoo is added. The underlying technology can be extended to any type of
image, including partial faces and scenes. This is an example of a cropped bedroom shot in JPG format being matched against a full database shot in PNG format taken from a different part of the room. Where hashing and other approaches cannot start to address this type of requirement, image matching technol- ogy now can. The technology demonstrated here is part of a complete redevelopment of a major system developed for the UK Po- lice, which includes scene, face, and object recognition. This focused on identifying offenders and victims in images of child abuse. It was launched at the House of Lords in London and earned the International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award.
Tiger Cropped Match One of the attractive features of tattoo recognition is that the
images of the tattoos already exist in the database, so minimal preparation is required before the system can be used. All that needs to be done is to point the software at the location of the
24 LAW and ORDER I June 2016
Iain Drummond is the CEO of Face Forensics, Inc. and may be reached at
iain.drummond@faceforensics.com.
LaO Post your comments on this story by visiting
www.lawandordermag.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68