Researchers at the University of Adelaide are investigating the possibility of using body recognition in criminal and missing personas investigations, according to an article in Australia’s ABC News Online. Body recognition analysis could prove useful in the many cases where facial metrics are not available.
It’s a fairly serious problem. As PhD student Teghan Lucas notes in the article, there’s often a lack of facial images available to investigators, since criminal cases caught on video “usually involve a deliberate attempt to cover the face, or fine details can’t be seen.”
While law enforcement authorities are always keen to find tools to help them with matching faces of suspects or missing individuals, there is an acknowledged need for similar technologies in non-facial applications, such as tattoo recognition. Ms Lucas believes that body recognition could provide another important set of metrics. “With a combination of eight body measurements,” she says, “it is possible to reduce the probability of finding a duplicate to the order of one in a quintillion.”
So far, Ms Lucas’ research has entailed the analysis of a database of anatomical measurements of US soldiers; she’s currently looking for subjects from the Adelaide metropolitan region who can act as new subjects.
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December 1, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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