MorphoTrak (Safran) has developed the top product for the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge, or Tatt-C. The tattoo recognition algorithm developed by MorphoTrak places first in NIST’s testing.
The purpose of Tatt-C was to advance the capabilities of biometric technology to recognize tattoos captured in images – a longtime aspiration for law enforcement authorities, for whom such technology would be particularly useful. NIST invited private market vendors and academic researchers to try to develop their own solutions, and of course that is how MorphoTrak, a leader in the biometrics industry that has historically performed well in NIST testing, became involved.
The company has not yet released any specific details about the performance of its system, other than that it turned out to be the best in terms of NIST’s testing, so it’s too early to say whether MorphoTrak has produced a breakthrough. Still, there is cause for encouragement, given NIST’s own assertions about the positive results of its challenge, along with MorphoTrak officials’ enthusiasm about their results. In a statement, MorphoTrak CEO Celeste Thomasson suggested that investigators’ reliance on keyword searches for tattoo matching would be a thing of the past, and asserted that MorphoTrak’s “continuously improving tattoo recognition algorithm takes the criminal justice, forensic investigation and public security communities one step closer to a high-performance automated tattoo recognition solution.”
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August 5, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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