Animetrics Face App

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3D Face App Finds The Bad Guy.

Don’t you just love cop TV shows these days? The star of the show seems to be the technology rather than the actors. But it’s the same old storyline: bad guy does something horrific — hero goes to the office, tech folks run down every traffic, ATM, security and baby monitor camera in a 200-mile radius. Then the hero says, “Run facial recognition on that one.” Three to 5 seconds later — bingo — the murderous international terrorist, Abu Aziz Atari Farnquart, from Lotzasandastan is identified and somehow the info on his exact whereabouts is also right there in the picture. They race over to catch him in their UC Ferrari 308 GTS, engage in a 5-minute firefight where no one gets hit despite the 2,375 rounds fired, give high fives all around and head out for an adult beverage and a night of frivolity.

The reality here isn’t the Ferrari 308 GTS as an undercover car, it’s the facial recognition capability available to us today. When it was first introduced, FR had a lot of limitations. Essentially, you needed a full frontal face shot to compare both the comparison sample and the data base sample to get anywhere near even an 80 percent match.

Animetrics of Conway, N.H. has cracked the code and offers a software solution that can actually be pushed out to the field for use by street cops.

Once the Animetrics software creates the face model, it can compare it to existing databases to get a match. It can even see “past” beards and hair changes, faces partially concealed by a hoody or faces turned partially away from the camera.

Ease of Use

All you need is a smartphone. The Animetrics software is easy to install on Apple iOS iPhones and on Android operating system phones as well. You open it like any other app. Gone are the days of the “name game.” What’s your name? Who me? Yes, you. Uh, it’s John Smith. Really? Yup, John Smith. You snap a photo of the alleged John Smith with your smartphone and it connects to the Animetrics FaceR Identity Management Solution (FIMS). This gives folks in the field access to a comprehensive facial-recognition product providing centralized management and advanced recognition services. It includes a full search, matching and access to multiple subject databases, including watch lists.

A couple of minutes later, you’ll find Mr. Smith was not telling you the truth. Go figure. He’s actually Aloysius McGiliculty who happens to have three local warrants and an NCIC hit too. Time to try out your new titanium, LED cuffs.

The other side of that coin is if he’s actually the good upstanding Mr. John Smith, the system is much less intrusive and you haven’t wasted a bunch of his time — or yours.

The software can even be used for real-time facial recognition for site security.
Who is that coming in the door?

Using a 3D face-mapping grid system, the software can even use a partial or
side view of a face by turning it into a 3D model.

The Investigative Side

Animetrics also has a solution to the problem of poor photo and video sources. Old cameras at the local mom and pop grocery or cameras at bad angles invariably are the ones catching a robbery in progress, battery, vandalism or a simple bike theft. Investigators need these to make an ID of the suspect.

Animetrics ForensicaGPS takes faces covered with beards, obscured by a hoodie or turned away so only a small amount of face is visible and creates a 3D model. The key to this is the software’s ability to convert 2D facial images into 3D avatars, which can be rotated and viewed from any angle. It employs highly sophisticated mathematical algorithms called FACEngine. It’s way above my 9th-grade Algebra understanding (I got a “D” anyway) but, it really looks cool and it works.

So, now we actually have the technology available to us the public thinks we’ve had all along. We can compete with the TV heroes. However, I don’t think we should high-five and go out for the frivolity and adult beverages after a modern-day gunfight at the OK Corral. Right, like that could happen, eh?