Facial Recognition Technology: How did FBI narrow down the suspects?

You might have read a lot about Boston Bombings, hence I'm not getting into any of that. Instead, I'm gonna solely concentrate on the technical side of it. I'm always intrigued by the findings that goes into making a successful or a failed capture/attempt. And I dunno, somehow I have always loved Hollywood action movies and have a great respect for The USA's defense system in the name of FBI, SWAT and so on. Unlike our Indian movies, Hollywood seldom shows their defense system in bad light. Why? Because they are really effective, up-to-date, have money to spend on defense and super strong.

The pressure on the entire defense syndicate in The USA on Boston Bombings would have been hell lot, owing to the fact that it took them 3 complete days and even then they could not come up with anything concrete. But, by end of the 3rd day, they narrowed down the suspects to these immigrants from Chechnya(Russia) - Two brothers,  "Tamerlan Tsarnaev", aged 26 and "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev", aged 19.

How did "Facial Recognition Technology" help FBI?

Some of you might be knowing the technology and some of you might have seen the usage of such technologies in Hollywood movies called "Facial Recognition Technology". A simple example would be - "Tagging of faces in Facebook Photos" - Mind you! Tagging is not same as Recognition, but the base concept is the same. The manhunt (fortunately, it is over now) was facilitated by surveillance coverage, amateur videos and photos on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social media sites. But how can someone find a suspect from a million population photographed or video taped? It is a humongous task and it is near to impossible, had it been couple of years ago. The hunt to figure two suspects out of the million faces would have taken hundreds of days, if this was done manually.

But now, it takes couple of hours, because of technologies like "facial recognition", "voice identification" and "object tracking". According to a software firm based out of The USA - "Their software can pick out parts of a face, the nose, eyes and shape of a cheek, create composites match and use the meta data. Then in what they described to be like a Google search, the software scans thousands of faces. The scans are effected according to age, gender and other category related data. They can also scan objects, for example backpacks, vehicles, etc.."

Because of being in nascent stage, this technology has its pit falls too - Facial Recognition Algorithms struggle once a person’s face is hidden by more than 20 degrees, but there are softwares that can correct hidden side up to 45 degrees. It does this by filling in the hidden side of a face by copying from the visible side. Hence, the software can do the job 'approximately' for sure. And mind you, these kind of pricey technologies are used only by the developed nations, as of now. It would be great to see the day, when India gets into such hi-fi mode, isn't it?

Here is the extra hunch - (for the action lovers):

You may argue with me as to, "How did the FBI get the lead on the 2 suspects: Yes! the software fetched their faces from the crowd, but how did they get the initial scoop on the 2 suspects?"

The answer is:

• FBI's strategy was simple, the bombings happened twice with a distance of 100 meters apart. FBI was looking for faces which were present in both the locations and narrowed down to couple of suspects. Now, should I even re-iterate that our 2 suspects were already part of that bunch?
• Secondly, they were scrutinizing for backpack wearing people in the crowd, again they got a good lead which points out to the 2 suspects.
• Last but never the least, FBI asked for public help by asking them to recognize the suspects by spreading their photos and also requested the public to share photographs/clips of these 2 suspects.There you go, public did the last bit. We all have seen the picture of the 2 suspects walking with their backpacks, but one of the audiences in the public shared the picture where both did not have their backpacks, instead were fleeing the area. Should I even explain further?

See for yourself in the picture below,

So this is how FBI/SWOT/Techies/Helpers/Onlookers/Media nailed the suspects using technology. Again, my salutes to the Mighty American Defense System & of course, to our very own technology!

Share your thoughts!

Image Courtesy: From Internet