Law enforcement officials may one day use their mobile phones to help identify criminals, thanks to an application being demonstrated by Visionics Corporation and Wirehound LLC.
The companies unveiled facial recognition capabilities on Java(TM) technology-enabled phones from Motorola this week at the 2002 JavaOne(SM) Developer Conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center (Booth #1728).
The application, developed specifically for a law enforcement agency, uses Visionics' FaceIt(R) ARGUS as the delivery platform for facial recognition capabilities and Wirehound's Birddog software on Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME(TM)) technology-enabled mobile phone with a color display. The FaceIt ARGUS system automatically finds faces in a field of view and searches them against a mug shot database. Upon finding a match, the Birddog component generates a wireless alert to the phones used by mobile law enforcement officials, who are then able to verify the identity of the subject. The phones can store multiple images and are alerted when a new image arrives. Non-matched images are automatically discarded from the system.
"By teaming with Wirehound, we are now providing a compelling solution for on-the-spot criminal recognition," said Dr. Joseph J. Atick, chairman and chief executive officer of Visionics. "Our main achievement is using the scalability of the FaceIt ARGUS as a platform to deliver facial recognition from any point of action to a device as familiar as a mobile phone, without the need for special hardware."
"By extending facial recognition capabilities to a wireless device, Visionics and Wirehound have answered the demands of mobile law enforcement officers, " said Steve Potell, president of Wirehound. "Using Java technology, we have created a user-friendly interface and communication protocol to access the matches generated by the FaceIt ARGUS system that can be used by the law enforcement community and beyond."