Biometrics: FBI to migrate to multi-modal biometrics

COMPUTERWORLD reports on the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, USA) announcement at the Biometric Consortium Conference that it will migrate from its IAFIS fingerprint database to a new multi-modal biometric database that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints, and voice scans.

Image Recognition: Facial recognition feature in iPhoto

I installed Apple's iPhoto '09 last night to test how the face recognition feature (called "Faces", of all things) worked. There are nearly 4,000 photos in my personal library, so I left it running overnight while it went through the database and, I assume, ran its face detection algorithm. I then decided to run a test. I manually identified the same person in two different photographs and had iPhoto go out and locate matches, which is its next step in its learning process - the user next needs to confirm or not confirm the identity of each one of the identifications it produces.

So how did it do at the end of this first step? Surprisingly well is the answer, particularly for a consumer-grade product. The raw numbers were 72 correct and 16 incorrect at this first step, but that doesn't tell the whole story. In the instances where it was incorrect, all but three were confused with family members (which admittedly is the most likely confusion outcome since for all pictures with faces in the database, generally at least one is a family member). In addition, it also correctly chose pictures where only one eye was visible, where the age was significantly different, and where there were different emotions clearly visible on the faces. It also did not seem to have a problem with different compression levels, low resolution (including one that was very granulated), face paint, under-exposure, black-and-white, scans (of printed pictures), and color. Finally, it made only one error out of 86 pictures in correctly detecting and locating the face.

So, even though this was not a properly constructed test, the results were more than impressive enough to warrant looking at it further for professional use in some applications.

PS. This is not a product review, per se, but I should say that my experience with this just-released version was not all positive. Namely, it was horribly slow during the step where one has to select a picture, go into the Faces mode, and then type in the subject's name. Each entry took two to three minutes to accomplish, so I saw the "spinning beach ball" that Mac OS-X uses to let you know it is busy quite a lot. Hopefully this bug will get corrected and patched quickly.

Image Recognition: Facial and license plate recognition news items

There are two on-line news articles related to image recognition that I would like to bring to your attention.

The first news article is about law enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, USA using a facial recognition package to match 16 years worth of prisoner mug shots with pictures taken by ATM (Automated Teller Machines) in a forgery and theft investigation to generate the lead needed to solve the case.

The second news article is from New Orleans, Louisiana, USA where local law enforcement used a license-plate recognition system to make 20 arrests and recover 23 stolen vehicles and license plates in a 25 day period.

The common thread here is, of course, automatic image recognition. These software algorithms have come a long way in the last decade. However, one should understand that the conditions are partially or completely controlled in both of these applications - i.e. distance, lighting, exposure, aspect (turned toward the camera), and (possibly) compression all fall within acceptable boundaries. In addition, with the license plate recognition problem, the character set and fonts were known in advance. The controlled conditions and a priori knowledge significantly increase the accuracy of the results tremendously and the chances of a successful investigation and prosecution.

(Hat-tip to JUSTNETNews, USA - I highly recommend this free service of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, or NLECTC, which is part of the National Institute of Justice, USA)

Biometrics: Request for automation to reduce FBI backlog

The StrategyPage has a short article on the backlog facing the FBI in analyzing DNA samples - 40,000 samples in the que with a work-off rate of 4 samples per week! Automation will reportedly improve the work-off rate to 200 samples per week.

One data point that would be useful in getting a fuller picture would be the rate that new samples are being added to the que. If anyone has any information on that, please post it in the comments.

The article also gives a brief history of biometrics, starting with appearance (visual) and going through fingerprints (first recognized as unique 4 centuries ago!) and others until the recent methods of gait and DNA.

Enjoy!

Physics: A round-up of recent interesting links!

My aplogies for my light posting of late. Outside commitments have kept me from posting nearly as much as I would like. Here is a collection of links that I have saved up over the last several weeks to blog about. I hope you enjoy them, but please note that some of these are not serious, scientific articles - just because it can be found on the Internet doesn't make it science, much less forensic science! If you are particularly interested in any of the topics addressed below, just let me know and I'll delve further in a future posting.

K-Lite codec package update

X-rays made from Scotch(R) tape (hat tip to A.A.)

Superconductivity Can Induce Magnetism

Deaf people feel their way to speech

Seeing Through The Skin: Optic-less Imaging Technology Could Beat Lens-based Imaging Devices

HOWTO read the secret forensic dots in your laser-printer output

Biometric identifcation by body language

Sound-card oscilloscope

Audio bone headphones

Scientists Watch As Listener's Brain Predicts Speaker's Words

Hidden airport scanner will pinpoint terrorists

Overpaid professions

Military camouflage

Police probe cell phones to catch criminals

How magicians control your mind

How forensic lab techniques work

Computers reassemble pieces of fractured archaeology

Review of Microsoft's Photosynth

Images of atmospheric optics

12 worst Photoshop mistakes ever

Darpa super-resolution vision technology R&D

How other senses adjust to blindness

Family name geographical profiler

Biometrics: Fingerprints versus palm prints

While driving back from Charleston, SC (USA) today - a lovely seaport city, by the way - I was catching up on my podcasts and happened to listen to a Wall Street Journal (US, center-right, business news) segment on new palm print readers.  The part that caught my attention was the claim by one interviewee that - and I'm paraphrasing here - "people" were concerned about using fingerprint biometric identification technologies because they were worried about later being falsely accused of a crime due to a mistaken match to a print left at a crime scene.  The interviewee went on to say that as police did not collect palm prints during crime scene investigations, palm print biometrics systems were getting a leg up in the market place.

This made me wonder exactly who are these "people" he referred to?  I'm rather doubtful that it is the general public that has these concerns.  I find it much easier to believe that elements of criminal "society" or privacy advocates would be tuned-in to these issues, but not the average man on the street.  I might be being too critical of this particular piece, but I thought that the reporter should have challenged, or at least followed up on, that statement.

In a larger context, this may unfortunately be a textbook example of how public policy is determined at the chaotic intersection where the general public, subject matter experts, issue advocates, the marketplace, and technology all collide.  I certainly hope not!

Biometrics: Fooling an age verification camera

Of course, this comes as no big surprise, but it is amusing - a news reporter in Japan used a photograph clipped from a magazine to fool an age verification camera system on a cigarette machine. Link to the Daily Irrelevant post.

Miscellaneous: More links

Working for a living interferes with blogging - Responsibility is such a cruel mistress.

As you can probably figure out from the intro, I have to give you my sincerest apologies, but work is leaving no time for thoughtful comments or analysis, so here are the links to the raw material that I hoped to turn into interesting posts:

Talk to the machine (Strategy Page)

Listening in with the council's lie detectors (Times Online; hat tip to A.F.)

Music Special: Five great auditory illusions (New Scientist)

Astronomy Technology Brings Nanoparticle Probes Into Sharper Focus (Science Daily)

Wanted: RAM's help in solving crimes (New Scientist) (a YouTube video explaining the attack can be found here)

Snakes Locate Prey Through Vibration Waves (Science Daily)

The 'non-lethal' flashlight (New Scientist Blogs)

Car Camera Recorder Pro: Video of Everything in Your Car's Path (TechnoRide)

Abuse of Auto-Tune (Cross Spectrum)

Justice Grants will Fund Research at CU-Denver (Business Journal)

FBI wants palm prints, eye scans, tattoos (CNN)

Enjoy! I hope to be back with more in-depth blogging soon.

Biometrics: Finger vein scanners being deployed

The use of various biometric technologies to identify individuals as a routine matter of daily life has been slow to catch on, thus far at least. Perhaps it is because there is insufficient demand, perhaps it costs too much (relative to the perceived benefits), or perhaps there are drawbacks with the technologies that have been fielded to implement it to this point.

As far as industry addressing possible technology drawbacks of the equipment, the Guardian (UK, left-wing newspaper) reports that Hitachi has started fielding a new type of biometric technology - finger vein scanners. Finger vein scanners differ from finger print scanners in that they are reportedly more difficult to fool. The principle of operation in similar to the blood oxygenation sensors commonly used in medical settings - i.e. shining a light onto (into) the skin of the finger which is absorbed by the hemoglobin in the capillaries, thereby allowing the imaging sensor to "take a picture" of the capillary pattern. These patterns are reportedly unique to an individual, just like finger prints. Of course, it all depends in how you implement the matching algorithm, but that is another issue - for more, see the Journal of Forensic Identification paper on errors in fingerprint examination.

Whether the scanners address the cost issue I mentioned above remains to be seen. For more details, including one disturbinging case of how a gang got around a finger print scanner to steal an automobile, you can check out the Guardian article.

Biometrics: Battlefield forensic identification

The Strategy Page has a brief article on how the United States' military has adopted tactics used by law enforcement, such as the collection of fingerprints, photographs, retinal scans, and DNA samples for use in identification by biometrics.  

One thing to notice in the article is the taking of photographs from multiple angles in order obtain more information than is possible from single one.  You can immediately demonstrate to yourself why it is useful to have shots from at least two angles by closing one eye while looking at someone - you immediately lose the depth information provided by your own stereoscopic vision, assuming you are normally-sighted.  This same depth information is useful in calculating biometrics for face recognition.

Biometrics: Implications of Pay by Voice commercial service

MIT's Technology Review has an article about the new Pay by Voice commercial service by a company called, surprisingly enough, Voice Pay. Now, I can imagine at least a couple of different general responses you, the reader, might have to this news. The first would be the semi-jaded, popular science devotee's reaction of "gee, that makes sense". The other would be the security-minded skeptic's reaction of "that's got to be so full of holes it will look like Swiss cheese."

Both responses are probably right in some sense, BUT, the devil is in the details, as they say. I'll point out the ones that seem the most obvious to me, without getting too technical.

1. The system is based around mobile (or cell, for the US readers) phones, which implies more environmental noise than fixed line, compression effects (from coding the voice to use less bandwidth over the air), and possible hands-free use (which means even more noise and a different "sound" to the voice, which could confuse the voice recognition algorithm).
2. Verifying someone's identity is easier than other recognition tasks (like picking someone out of a crowd). The system has been pre-trained on the person's characteristics and the system architecture is usually better controlled, for starters.
   
3. This implementation of identity verification uses voice biometrics as well as call-back to the previously registered mobile number. This allows the fusion of two different types of data, although it is over the same "channel." If the shopping is done on-line, then there is not only multiple types of data, but also multiple channels that the data is passing over, which increases security.
   
4. Fooling the system with a voice synthesizer might indeed be possible, but access to the potential victim's mobile phone would be required - as well as log-in details in some cases and 100% spoof rate could not be guaranteed.
5. The company obviously didn't want to get into the issues surrounding false positive/negative rates and credit card security, but the truth of the matter is that the existing credit card system is not very secure in itself, but the losses to the credit card industry due to fraud are small enough compared to the profits that it isn't worth the effort to them to make it significantly more secure. (Note: Before anyone emails me about credit cards with chip and PIN, please consider just how big the credit card market is and how many traditional chipless cards are out there and will be for many years to come.) The company seems to be assuming that the same rules will apply here - if they succeed in getting into the market in a big way, their losses due to fraud will be easily written off.

There is much more that I could say here, but in the interest of not turning this into a paper by itself, I'll cut it off here. Feel free to email me or post a comment, though.

Biometrics: Gait recognition accuracy rates in controlled conditions

Researchers at the University of Southampton (UK) reported a 100% accuracy rate for verifying the identity of individuals by automatically analyzing the way they walk. IT Week (a UK information technology magazine) has some details.

Based on the IT Week article, it appeared to me that all the tests were conducted under controlled conditions. Visually-based biometric techniques generally require good lighting conditions (i.e. proper exposure of the image) and resolution. They also require that the features needed for recognition are not occluded.

Why would one need gait recognition when face recognition already exists? Some obvious advantages are that gait recognition doesn't require that the face is oriented toward the camera and the image resolution requirements are not as high. But if the conditions are controlled anyway, why can't the person be required to be close to and facing the camera?

A couple of questions that come to mind are 1) how much less the spatial resolution can be and 2) how robust it is to image compression (e.g. MPEG-4)? These could give the technique additional advantages.

One final observation I should make is that, as with all biometric techniques, being able to fuse the results of more than one technique improves the system accuracy and robustness. That alone could justify the inclusion of the technique in fielded systems.

Biometrics: Biometric passport with RFID is hacked remotely

A regular reader pointed me to the Daily Mail (a UK tabloid) article describing how they had a security expert "hack" one of the new biometric passports with an electronic Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) microchip to extract all of the digital data. They arranged to simulate intercepting the passport being mailed from the government to the citizen. Because the passport had this RFID chip, it could be remotely interrogated, they were able to do this without even opening the postal envelope containing the passport. Of course, the data was encrypted, so then the security expert had to break that (and he succeeded). The only apriori information he needed was the citizen's date of birth, which he obtained through searching the Internet. The entire process took four days, but in the end, he was able to recover all of the passport's digital data, which even included the citizen's digital picture.

It seems pretty obvious that they either didn't bother to do a proper independent security analysis before they developed and deployed the system or the managers discounted the results of any one that was done. Because of that lapse, now it seems that they need to rethink their encryption scheme at the very least. When they do, it might make sense to add some type of limit to the number of times a passport can be interrogated with an incorrect password, either in a certain time window or an accumulated number over the life cycle of the passport.