2010 Research Summary

Facial Image Indexing Interfaces

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Trevor Darrell and Ashley Michelle Eden

Dept. of Health and Human Services

During a disaster a large number of children may become separated from their families. Many of these children, especially the younger ones, may be unable or unwilling to identify themselves, making the task of reuniting them with their families especially difficult. Without a system in place for hospitals to document their unidentified children and to help parents search, families could be separated for months. After Katrina it was 6 months until the last child was reunited with her family. We are working on a system where each hospital takes digital photos of the childrens' faces, and the system is able to automatically extract features useful for identification. We are also hoping to extend the system to automatically refine image searches based on the identification of similar looking faces. Along those lines, we are working on determining a metric for feature importance in facial similarity.

Figure 1: Example landmark analysis of a child's face.