Smile: software captures faces in bad surveillance imagery.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Defense Technology Newswire

Imagery collected in a chaotic war-zone isn't always pristine, making it difficult for analysts to identify suspects in photos and videos.

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Particularly at long ranges, atmospheric "noise" can wreak havoc on the quality of images being collected by surveillance cameras.

New Hampshire-based Animetrics has developed technology to create clear 3-D facial renderings from low-quality photos and videos. ForensicaGPS uses a patented system of mathematics and mapping to generate 3-D geometry from 2-D coordinates. It takes images, improves visibility of the face and creates a model specific to structure, geometry and texture.

The application also performs metric analysis that scores subjects based on facial similarities. Up to five images of each subject can be used to create the 3-D model and to compare it to other suspect images.

"The 3-D information of the face biometric is created from normal photographs, not from special...