MARCH 27--Law-enforcement officials may one day use their mobile phones to help identify criminals, thanks to an application being demonstrated by Visionics Corporation (www.visionics.com) and Wirehound LLC (www.wirehound.com). The companies recently unveiled facial-recognition capabilities on Java technology-enabled phones from Motorola at the 2002 JavaOne Developer Conference in San Francisco, CA.
The application, developed specifically for a law-enforcement agency, uses Visionics FaceIt ARGUS as the delivery platform for facial-recognition capabilities and Wirehound's Birddog software on Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) technology-enabled mobile phone with a color display. The FaceIt ARGUS system automatically finds faces in a field of view and searches them against a mug-shot database. Upon finding a match, the Birddog component generates a wireless alert to the phones used by mobile law-enforcement officials, who are then able to verify the identity of the subject. The phones can store multiple images and are alerted when a new image arrives. Nonmatched images are automatically discarded from the system.
