The FBI is developing software to identify people by their tattoos

Tattoos often symbolize a person’s passions, ideologies, religious beliefs, and even social relationships. With one in five US adults donning tattoos, designs have become critical identifiers long used by law enforcement agencies to recognize criminals and victims, and to resolve investigations. Now, a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claims that law enforcement agencies want to automate the process, creating a database using  software that identifies citizens by their tattoos. The algorithm would also decipher tattoos that “contain intelligence, messages, meaning and motivation,”. Historically, law enforcement agencies have followed the American National Standard for Information Systems- National Institute of Standards and Technology—ANSI-NIST-ITL 1-2011—standard  to collect and assign standard class keyword labels that describe the increasing variety of new tattoos. Despite the standardized system, the subjectivity of human annotation and the growing need for multiple keywords to describe some tattoos can allow the same tattoo to be labeled differently between examiners. As such, the shortcomings of keyword-based tattoo image retrieval have driven the need for automated image-based tattoo recognition capabilities.

Tattoo research began at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2014, using a database of prisoner’s tattoos. NIST hopes to use the database to “map connections between people with similarly themed tattoos or make inferences about people from their tattoos.” Computer algorithm systems are nothing new to the criminal justice system, with prosecutors often using the information from algorithms predicting criminals’ probability of committing a future crime when sentencing.

While the project is still in its early phases of development, the EFF is calling to suspend research citing a “disregard for typical government research practices” and the invasive nature of the project. Law enforcement agencies already use tattoos as an aspect of identification, but hope that computerized systems will standardize classification process.

Source: Gizmodo, NIST, EEF