FBI wants better automated image analysis for tattoos [News]

Nothing makes a statement quite like a tattoo. And law enforcement in the United States increasingly uses them to help identify criminals and, sometimes, the victims of crime or natural disasters. Today police take photographs of tattoos when suspects are booked, categorizing them using keywords defined in a biometric standard called ANSI-NIST-ITL 1-2011. The standard has eight main categories, such as "animal" and "plant," as well as 70 subcategories, such as "cat," "bird," "flower," and "leaf." The FBI maintains a database of tattoos as part of its Next Generation Identification Program, but searching by keyword is problematic because the categories aren't granular enough and different people often tag the same tattoo differently. "It's very subjective as to what each person sees within a tattoo," says Eric Phillips, management and program analyst at the FBI's Biometric Center of Excellence, in Clarksburg, W.Va. The stylized letter D insignia of the Detroit Tigers baseball team, for example, is easily misinterpreted, says Mei Ngan, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). One person might recognize it as the team's emblem, but another might see it as just a letter, and yet another might consider it an abstract design.