from: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38775,00.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38775,00.html"> ID Them By the Way They Walk</A> ----- ID Them By the Way They Walk by Kathleen Ellis 8:20 a.m. Sep. 15, 2000 PDT GAITHERSBURG, Maryland -- Forget voice print matching and face recognition: Future technology could identify someone by the way they walk. Pattern-recognition software soon will be able to analyze the stride of a person, University of Maryland professor Larry Davis said Thursday at the Biom etric Consortium 2000 Conference co-sponsored by the National Security Agency. Davis said his research group has created a prototype that can filter out noise from a video image and recognize whether a person is walking past the camera, even in windy or cloudy conditions. "We can now detect a person -- any person -- walking in field of view outdoors with a moving camera," Davis told about 350 people who showed up at the two-day event also sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Army. Davis added that Daimler-Benz is planning to use the technology to alert drivers to potential collisions. The next step: Distinguishing one person's gait from another's, something Davis said his group will be able to do reliably enough in the future to aid in "surveillance situations," even when someone's face is not visible. By isolating what he called a "signature of human motion," the technology could be used to perform bulk surveillance in public areas, assuming that information about who walks in what way is on file. Other new techniques could also be used by law enforcement agencies. Visionics' FaceIt system works by isolating human faces in still pictures and then comparing them to photos in a database containing a specific population, such as licensed drivers, known criminals or missing children. The system then ranks each photo in the database by likelihood that the two images, when paired together, represent the same person. Visionics Vice President Paul Griffin said the system is currently being used by the state of Virginia to search for duplicate state ID cards and driver's licenses. He said that at least two other states are testing the technology for their own use. ANSER, a government-funded research institute, uses FaceIt as part of their project to locate missing children on the Internet. ANSER spokesperson Joe Iseman said the algorithms are still being trained to accommodate for factors such as aging, image resolution and lighting variances in different photos. "But when you incorporate known variables such as age, hair color, race, and gender into the search criteria, the chance of getting a match is very high," Iseman said. Other uses for FaceIt technology -- while beneficial for law enforcement -- are more problematic, privacy activists contend. The use of FaceIt in Newham, England, in closed-circuit video surveillance systems of public outdoor areas, earned the town the dubious distinction of a Big Brother Award last year from the Privacy International group. Newham is a borough in East London that has installed a face-recognition system that -- when coupled with over 200 cameras -- picks out known criminals, authorities say. Backers say the Newham system's purported benefits include reducing area crime by 40 percent. "Biometric technology is definitely a double-edged sword," said David Sobel, general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "On the one hand, you have these great tools for computer security and user authentication which will enhance user privacy, but on the other you have the Newham situation. We'll be monitoring this field's progress very closely." The U.S. government has invested heavily in biometrics technology. Other technologies that were showcased at the conference included a new system designed by CyberSign. CyberSign works by incorporating an electronic pen and pad system into a common Windows-based PC. The user can attach unique, verifiable and legally binding hand-written signatures to electronic documents. Copyright � 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site. All rights reserved. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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