Australian Department Of Defence Eyes Biometrics to ID victims.
Australian Department Of Defence Eyes Biometrics – The Australian Department of Defence is working on a project that will see AI and face recognition used to identify victims of natural disasters.
According to Richard Bassed, head of Melbourne-based Monash University’s Department of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), the project might be completed in 5 years.
“Very early stages,” Bassed blogged on the University’s website. “But we are thinking that we might be able to identify quite large numbers of people, and reduce the cost and time required to identify the remainder.
Bassed referenced the earthquake disaster in Türkiye and Syria as being a driver of the technology.
“Both Türkiye and Syria are member countries of Interpol, which designed and implemented the standard operating procedure for disaster victim identification,” Bassed explained.
“But current news reports say bodies are being buried in mass graves on site in Türkiye-Syria, many without being formally identified, with a shortage of forensic investigators on the ground.”
Australian Department Of Defence Eyes Biometrics
Bassed said similar issues arise from conflicts around the world.
“The war graves in Iraq and Iran and Syria and everywhere else? People aren’t trying to do anything there, partly because of the political problems in some of those countries, but also because of the huge, huge cost and effort to do it,” Bassed wrote.
He also pointed out that facial recognition was being used to reunite children with surviving family in Türkiye.
In Australia, the collaborative VIFM-Department of Defence project would create an extensive database of face images (from passports, driver’s licenses and other IDs) alongside a facial recognition algorithm to identify them.
“We’re going to need to either tweak a current algorithm or create our own facial recognition algorithm that will work reliably with photographs of them when the body is found,” Bassed says.
“Then you can start comparing the photos while alive with the post-mortem images of the deceased through a machine-learning facial recognition algorithm.”
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“Australian Department Of Defence Eyes Biometrics to ID victims.”
