Integration News
MorphoTrak tattoo ID places first in NIST evaluation

Each trial examined a critical aspect of performance for an automated tattoo recognition solution. In the identification trials, the MorphoTrak algorithm successfully found different instances of the same tattoo on the same subject, collected over time. MorphoTrak also excelled at finding a small region of interest within a larger tattoo, as well as determining whether an image contained a tattoo.

Tattoo images have traditionally been regarded as a soft biometric – that is, visual information that can be used to narrow down the range of candidates for identification and investigation, but cannot be used to explicitly identify an individual. Law enforcement organizations have been collecting tattoo images as long as they have been collecting mugshots, and while mugshots can now be submitted for automated searches using face recognition algorithms, tattoos are still categorized by text, in broad categories such as “Dragon,” and “Skull.” The team that developed MorphoTrak’s tattoo recognition algorithm aims to help law enforcement make the transition from keyword search to automated search of tattoo images, much in the same way we now search for fingerprints and faces.

For more information about the recent NIST Tatt-C test, visit http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/tatt-c.cfm.