Tattoos might be the next biometric frontier, with one in five Americans sporting ink these days. The FBI is partnering with academia and private firms to develop a computer program that could help police identify people based on their body ink.
Matching tattoos with
the government database could help officials identify victims of
natural disasters, such as earthquakes or tsunamis. However, the
government’s primary interest is they believe matching the
tattoos into a computer system, could help to catch more
criminals, as they have more body ink than the general
population, according to computer scientist Mei Ngan.
Ngan works at the National Institute for Standards and Technology
(NIST), a branch of the Department of Commerce that teamed up
with the FBI to organize a “challenge” workshop. This
gave an opportunity to universities and corporations to show off
the results of their research into tattoo-matching technology.
Got ink? Tattoo algorithms could soon help identify criminals:
http://t.co/QCp7Khiq6cpic.twitter.com/CATFoqyDO7
— Nextgov (@Nextgov) June
11, 2015
“You can’t use it as a primary biometric like a finger print
or face because it’s not necessarily uniquely identifying,”
Ngan told the Washington Post. “But it can really help in
cold cases where you don’t have those things.”
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MORE: UK police trained to detect ‘pedophile signs’ in tattoos
and clothing
Alvaro Bedoya, of the Center on Privacy Technology at
Georgetown Law School, told the Post that identifying people on
the basis of tattoos is less controversial than facial
recognition or motion analysis, but that technology may be
outpacing the law.
“People are being identified remotely without their
knowledge,” Bedoya said, “and right now the Fourth
Amendment doesn’t really say anything about that.”
The workshop was organized by the NIST at the agency’s
headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and sponsored by the
FBI’s Biometric Center of Excellence. Participants tested their
image-recognition software in five different scenarios, such as
basic tattoo detection, identification over time, and matching a
partial image of a tattoo to a complete photo.
Each team was given the same set of images, drawn from the FBI’s
existing Next Generation Identification database that includes
tattoos in addition to fingerprints and facial recognition.
Currently, the database relies on written description of the
tattoos, which can be vague and sometimes not particularly
helpful, says Ngan.
NIST Workshop Considers Ways to Improve #Tattoo
Recognition http://t.co/8rbzC6dXFY pic.twitter.com/2rqWZETyGx
— NIST (@usnistgov) June
8, 2015
Some of the systems had
“hit rates well above 90 percent” in certain tests, like
matching a partial photo of the tattoo to the whole thing. Two
areas that needed further research, Ngan said, were
distinguishing similar tattoos on different people, and
recognizing a tattoo from a sketch or a drawing, rather than a
photo.
“Improving the quality of tattoo images during collection is
another area that may also improve recognition accuracy,”
Ngan said.
Participants in the NIST workshop included the imaging company
Compass Technical Consulting, the Fraunhofer Institute of
Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation, the French
Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the nonprofit
research organization MITRE, the biometric tracking technology
firm MorphoTrak, and Purdue University.
Founded in 1901, the NIST is one of the oldest US government
science laboratories. It has been at the forefront of biometric
research for decades, conducting mass evaluations of fingerprint
and face recognition systems.