New photo system recognises faces

A sophisticated image management system, currently being introduced, has a facial recognition capability for comparing images of suspects with photos already in the Police database.

The new system, known as IMS, replaces PIMS which holds photos of prisoners and firearms license holders. Approximately 800,000 photos of arrested people are held in PIMS, which has been operating for more than 10 years.

All photos stored in PIMS will be relocated onto IMS. It will act as a single repository for all identification images, including prisoners and firearms licence holders initially, and suspects and missing persons in the future.

A mock up of how the IMS uses facial recognition software to automatically locate and record a number of points
and measurements from a person's face.

Every trained user will eventually be able to access the system to create their own photo line-ups and photo books, run searches against other photos, and, in the future, directly input photos for live capture into the system. All photos will be able to be called up via NIA.

The system's facial recognition capability is a key feature, using biometrics to create a distinct template of a person's face, says National Forensic Services Advisor, Inspector John Walker.

"Each time a photo is loaded into the system, IMS uses facial recognition software to automatically locate and record a number of points and measurements from the person's face."

These physical characteristics include the distance between eyes, nose, mouth, angles of the jaw and forehead, and lengths of portions of the face.

"This biometric data creates a unique template which can be invaluable for identifying suspects from photos," says John.

When a search has been completed using the facial recognition function, IMS displays photos of possible candidates. It rates each candidate, giving a numeric score for how similar the candidate is to the suspect.

As well as being useful for identification purposes, IMS is also able to select filler candidates for creating photo line-ups at any time. This process is much quicker than the current time-consuming manual method.

John says in the future, IMS could also play a role in helping identify potential suspects from closed circuit television cameras (CCTV).

"It could be possible to take images from CCTV cameras and run them through the system to find possible candidates already on our image database."

The success of this will depend on the CCTV images being of sufficient quality and from the right angle for the facial recognition software to compare them against photos in the database.

In the future, IMS will also provide watch list monitoring using its biometric facial recognition ability. Every new photo entered into the system will be run against the watch list to look for a potential candidate.

Police National Headquarters' photography section will soon begin using IMS, with a staged roll-out to all districts in the first half of 2008.