CHAMPAIGN, IL--Biometric imaging requires individuals to willingly submit personal data such as photos, fingerprints, and retinal scans for database storage. And even facial-recognition software requires a database of known faces against which to compare a series of images. But what about the case of an unknown threat—a person described only in terms of approximate age, hair color, height and weight, type of clothing, or other personal attributes? In such a situation, image-processing algorithms need to assess a number of different image cues in order to identify a threat within an image scene of interest.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign utilized multiple linear regression data from the images of 1600 faces to develop an imaging algorithm that estimates a person’s age. While the technique is best applied to non-homeland-security applications such as determining what types of soft drinks teenagers like most (video cameras would identify persons of teenage status and record what they were buying), it could also be applied to a homeland-security situation in which a “person of interest” of a known age needs to be found in a crowd of individuals. The software is currently 80% accurate when estimating age to within ten years.
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.