Tattoo Detectives

摘要

Crooks may wear gloves and masks to hide their identity, but few think to cover their ink. If there's a video record of a crime, cops can sometimes use exposed tats to identify a perp or at least his gang affiliation. But trying to match a specific piece of inkwork against a vast photo database has been like searching for an image on AltaVista in 1998. Police have relied on archaic keyword tagging ("animal," "female face," and that old favorite, "other"). "It doesn't work very well," says Michigan State University biometrics expert Anil K. Jain, who received FBI funding to develop an alternative tentatively called Tattoo-ID.