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Face Forensics announces Disaster Victim Identification Suite
March 21, 2023 By Blue Line Staff
Mar. 21, 2023, Vancouver, B.C. – Face Forensics has released a new version of its f2 recognition software specifically designed to help identify the bodies of deceased people from their faces, even if the eyes are closed and the face is significantly damaged, together with other markings such as tattoos.
Developed originally at the request of an international aid agency to identify the bodies of migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe, the Disaster Victim Identification suite is said to combine Face Forensics’ underlying corpse identification and tattoo recognition technologies.
Closed eyes are an issue because face recognition systems place much value on the eye area due to the clear variations, sharp edges and high contrast of the features there. If both eyeballs are not visible the recognition process will not work. The f2 is designed to overcome this by providing the ability to crop out an undamaged part of a face, place it over a generic facial template and match this against the same area on full faces in a database, making it possible to work with closed eyes and faces that have been damaged.
When a body is found, an investigator will take several photos of their face. Each of the shots will be cropped if necessary and copied into the search window where they will be automatically encoded and matched against the encodings of all the faces in the database. The top matches will then be displayed, initially as thumbnail images, for investigators to confirm visually.
The system will automatically connect to and enrol images in existing external databases, as well as import and enrol images provided by relatives.
Multiple filters are available to narrow down the possible matches before face matching is applied.
The Disaster Victim Identification Suite is available as application, as a .NET SDK, and as a web service. It can search databases across multiple machines on a VPN, under appropriate controls.
A short video can be seen at https://youtu.be/PDUWV8tU98w
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