Technologies for Identifying Missing Children, Final Report

• NCJ Number: 186277
• Date Published: September 2000
• Length: 70 pages
• Grant Number(s): 97-LB-VX-K025
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description

Annotation

This report describes the research and development efforts of Analytic Services Inc. (ANSER) in developing technologies for identifying missing children.

Abstract

One of the primary goals of this project has been to develop software systems that incorporate automated facial matching and intelligent software agents (ISAs) into systems that can aid law enforcement and other organizations in locating missing children and countering the exploitation of children, while leveraging scarce law enforcement staff resources. Another project goal has been to demonstrate technologies to local, State, and Federal law enforcement officials to show the technologies' usefulness and readiness. The project has focused on the development of a face-recognition tool that performs face age progression and age regression in automatically matching photographic resources, particularly in missing children's cases. In addition, the project undertook the development of software based on ISAs to assist investigators in searching for, monitoring, and analyzing information on the Internet and in internal databases. Several artificial intelligence software systems have been developed as components in the areas of text categorization, data mining, and case analysis based on expert systems. Agent frameworks to develop, manage, and control lower level ISAs were also developed. In addition to the aforementioned technologies, the project integrated many of the complementary software components into several larger prototype systems for test and evaluation in pilot projects. Finally, the project disseminated a few initial and interim prototype demonstrations to encourage law enforcement agencies to participate as partners in a second research and development project. This report describes 10 prototype demonstration systems that have been developed and integrated by ANSER. The ANSER team has successfully developed solutions that will substantially advance robust and scalable (potentially enterprise-level) law enforcement investigative capabilities in cases that involve missing and exploited children. Future directions for such technologies and pilot projects are discussed.