The stated aim is to better identify criminals.
The process is surprising, but it is very serious. The journal Nature reports that a team of American researchers collaborating with justice on a program to detect, analyze and interpret pictures of tattoos. This collaboration follows a competition held in early June in part by the FBI, the US Defense Department and the Justice recalls Quartz. The “winner” was then selected to work with the government.
The whole being to arrive to replace “the hand searches of databases on the body marks, that waste of time, by an image comparison software to help identify victims of crime and suspects “, says Nature. Because the gang members are regularly tattooed, the authorities asked competitors to offer a program to identify swastikas, snakes, knights, or witches.
The algorithm selected for development should afford to forget the simple description “cat tattoo” and distinguish a cat tattoo of a Hello Kitty tattoo for example. It is even able to recognize the differences in shape and color in the tattoo photos, notes Nature.
But Huffman Landis, an engineer at MITRE, a Massachusetts company, the newspaper explains that the tattoo of recognition is much more difficult than facial recognition due to multiple variations and details they contain. If we add to this the fact that tattoos sometimes become blurred, they are changed or the hairs coming hide the drawing, the researchers have yet to implement many adjustment variables.
More broadly, the software still very difficult to understand and interpret the images. “Our most advanced computers have trouble distinguishing images of cats” , Quartz quips, adding that the use of such a powerful algorithm goes beyond mere legal utility: “As the director of research in artificial intelligence at Stanford, Fei-Fei Li, suggested in his Ted Talk, in future, we could have safety systems that can answer a video of a child drowning by detecting what is happening, rather than simply recording it. “
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