Your mother said you’d regret getting that tattoo one day. Earlier this summer the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the FBI doubled-down on efforts that could prove her right.
Earlier this month, the two organizations launched Tatt-E (Tattoo Recognition Technology Evaluation), an effort to refine gains made in an earlier iteration called Tatt-C — the “C” stands for challenge — that concluded in March of 2015.
Here’s how it works: The NIST and FBI accepted the entry requests of six organizations, among them, private security companies like MorphoTrak, not-for-profit research organizations like MITRE, and academic institutions like Purdue University. The entrants were then given a sample set of “16,716 tattoo images collected operationally by law enforcement,” according to NIST’s final report on Tatt-C’s results and tasked with creating software similar to facial recognition solutions already in use by law enforcement, only for tattoos.
The software should be able to identify a tattoo in a crowd or an image, and match that tattoo to one in a law enforcement database to help make a positive ID or single-out a suspect in a crime.
Tatt-E uses a data set far in excess of 100,000 images and hopes to be a closer simulation of real-world scenarios. The FBI and NIST are counting on the larger data set to help programmers work out the kinks of previous iterations.