In recent times it has become apparent that data sharing capabilities across state departments and law enforcement agencies is an issue, especially in terms of tracking, monitoring, and identifying persons of interest. There is a need to assess the image capture process, as well as sharing capabilities, and to incorporate commercially available facial recognition technology to reduce the errors in identifying persons of interest. The BSPA Lab is currently working on a project in cooperation with the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC). The goal of this project is to integrate facial recognition technology into the IDOC system to allow for more efficient and accurate monitoring and identifying of fugitives and persons of interest.
There are currently a number of sub-projects going on in the lab that are necessary to determine if legacy and current mugshot images are NIST Mugshot Best Practices standard compliant and of good enough quality to be used in a facial recognition system. These projects will provide important feedback to the IDOC of the current state of their mugshot images as well as the image capture process so the IDOC can better understand if these legacy images will be usable.
The first project currently being conducted includes an image quality and standard compliance assessment of the electronic mugshot database, this database contains 49,694 mugshot images all of different individuals.
The second project will perform image quality as well as performance rates for 13,000 legacy mugshot images that were collected from the IDOC.
The third project will analyze the same 13,000 legacy mugshot images to determine percentages that already conform to the NIST standard, that can be optimized for standard compliance, and that cannot be optimized for standard compliance.
The last project involves assessing the data to determine image quality attributes that are the cause of most of the non-standard compliance, observe current image capture processes employed at IDOC facilities, and from the data and observation create a standard compliant layout and best practices guide to be implemented in IDOC facilities to capture standard compliant images in the future.