Communications of the ACM
Fbi Wants Better Automated Image Analysis For Tattoos
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is working with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to find a better way to identify people from their tatoos.
Credit: Oliver Strewe/Getty Images
Police forces today regularly photograph tattoos when suspects are booked and categorize them using a biometric standard with several categories and subcategories. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintains a database of tattoo images as part of its Next Generation Identification Program, but searching the database can be difficult due to categorization issues and a lack of granularity. However, the FBI recently collaborated with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to find a better way to search for matching tatoos.
Last fall, NIST issued a challenge to assess the state of the art in tattoo identification technology. Six organizations participated in the challenge: Compass Technical Consulting, the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies, and Image Exploitation, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, MITRE, MorphoTrak, and Purdue University. The tattoo-identification algorithms of the six organizations were required to perform five different types of searches. The six groups performed well on three of these: determining if an image contains a tattoo, identifying the same tattoo on the same person over time, and identifying a small segment of a larger tattoo. However, they performed poorly on two of the searches: identifying visually similar tattoos on different people, and searching for similar tattoos across various media.
From IEEE Spectrum
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