Facial Recognition Research Intensifies Research on facial recognition technology is being stepped up to include ‘soft’ biometrics, such as using ears as a unique element of identificaiton.

Facial recognition has become an increasingly common element in security surveillance, enabling identification of faces in images taken from a distance and in a crowd. But facial recognition is just a step along the way to more and better identification techniques being sought by the U.S. government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

The agency has challenged top research teams to revolutionize how machines recognize people with a competition announced Nov. 8, according to New Scientist magazine. The announcement on the IARPA website, dated Nov. 8 said, “Intelligence analysts often rely on facial images to assist in establishing the identity of an individual, but the sheer volume of possibly relevant video and photographs can be daunting. While automated face recognition tools can assist analysts in this task, current tools perform best on well-posed, frontal facial photos taken for identification purposes … IARPA seeks dramatic improvements in unconstrained face recognition by funding rigorous, high-quality research drawing on a variety of fields to develop novel representations to encode the shape, texture, and dynamics of a face and new ways to use these techniques for faster and more accurate search and retrieval.”

The typical approach requires sorting through frame after frame of camera footage to find ones that offer a good chance for identification […]