A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed software that can match sketches of faces to photos, according to a Michigan Radio article by Virginia Gordan. The tool could have useful applications in the realm of law enforcement, where police sketches are sometimes all that officers have to go by in looking for a suspect.
Team leader Anil Jain explained the advantage offered by their new FaceSketchID system, noting that while the current technology can match two photos, it doesn’t “do very well in matching a composite with a photo. So that’s the gap which we have filled through our research,” he said.
It’s good timing for this kind of technology to emerge. Interest in biometrics is growing in law enforcement agencies around the world, and in a recent call for private sector help the US Department of Homeland Security was looking for almost exactly this kind of system, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a call for similar technology in pursuit of tattoo recognition. It’s no surprise, then, that the team has already licensed its software to biometric tech company Morpho.
—
November 13, 2014 – by Alex Perala
Follow Us