Face Forensics adapts biometric software for disaster victim identification

Face Forensics has responded to a request from an international agency by developing a Disaster Victim Identification suite based on its biometric corpse and tattoo recognition technologies.

The new f2 software is specifically designed to help identify deceased people by matching their faces, even if their eyes are closed and they have suffered damage or other are obscured by other markings like tattoos.

The international agency requesting the update is attempting to identify people who have died crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe.

The company also launched a system for investigating human trafficking and child abuse last year, with CEO Ian Drummond saying at the time that f2 had worked with Red Cross International on identifying migrants.

Facial recognition is traditionally very dependent on information from the subject’s open eyes, due to the sharp edges and high contrast of their features, f2 says. The company developed technology to work around this limitation by providing an ability to crop part of the face image and place it over a generic face biometric template, the announcement explains.

The system works by ingesting several photos of the subject’s face, cropping them if necessary, automatically encoding them and then comparing them to templates in the database. The top matches are then displayed for visual confirmation by investigators.

Multiple filters are provided to narrow down possible matches.

The database is built by automatically enrolling images from external databases, and importing images provided by relatives.

Face Forensics is making its Disaster Victim Identification suite available as an application, a .NET SDK, and a web service.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometric matching  |  biometric software  |  biometrics  |  corpse identification  |  Face Forensics  |  facial recognition  |  forensics  |  research and development