Advanced Discovery patents its facial recognition technology

Advanced Discovery has filed a patent covering facial recognition technology in eDiscovery workflows, designed to automate the review of large volumes of photographic images to identify a person’s presence and prioritize documents within attorney document reviews.

The AI algorithm is capable of browsing through hundreds of thousands of faces in images spanning several years to recognize a specific face, according to a report by Legaltech news.

Advanced Discovery has already made the technology available through e-discovery platforms, such as kCura’s Relativity and Ipro’s Eclipse.

Rick Hutchinson, chief technology officer at Advanced Discovery, said the idea for the facial recognition technology came from a law firm, whose client was trying to analyze 10 TB of video data to disprove the plaintiff’s claim that they attended several corporate events over a span of many years.

Hutchinson said the footage captured the faces of “tens of thousands of people,” and the defense “had all these images and no way to go through them in a cost-effective manner.”

Once Advanced Discovery was hired to take on the facial recognition task, Hutchinson “met with the development team, whiteboarded out a solution, and… beta tested it and ran multiple iterations.”

From there, Hutchinson’s team built a flexible software platform that could integrate into popular platforms such as Relativity.

Advanced Discovery is unique in that it is built to integrate with SQL back end review platforms, which include e-discovery workflow tools.

This marks the third patent Advanced Discovery filed this year. The company was granted a patent (US9424321B1) last August for Riskcovery, a portable conceptual analytics platform that identifies potential violations and compliance risks.

The two other patents filed this year are Intelligent QC, an automated quality control solution designed to eliminate data discrepancies throughout the eDiscovery process; and Intelligent Messaging Normalization, data normalization tools to optimize the review of standard SMS platforms.

“Advanced Discovery is delivering an entirely new class of patented and patent-pending technologies and workflows that feature AI and predictive modeling to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying and forecasting risk — at scale,” said Jim Burke, CEO of Advanced Discovery. “Investments in our people and processes continue to produce new ways to help our clients decrease the complexity and cost of handling the exponential growth in data types and volume. Many are talking about technology-driven innovation; Advanced Discovery is delivering.”

Article Topics

artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  legal  |  patents