Missing Children Locator Agent

The Problem
Photographs are extremely important in cases involving missing children, but law enforcement officers do not have the tools to quickly and conveniently compare photographic images with database galleries of missing children.

With the explosion of Internet use, vast amounts of available open-source data may be relevant to missing children cases. Children and parents are creating home pages, and schools are publishing yearbooks on the Internet. At the same time, pornography circulated with the aid of the Internet may also contain faces of missing and exploited children. Law enforcement officers do not have the tools that would enable them to find important clues hidden on the Internet.

The Solution: Missing Children Locator Agent
The ANSER team, funded under National Institute of Justice Cooperative Agreement 98-LB-VX-K021, is developing a system of intelligent software agents integrated with face recognition engines. Intelligent software agents continuously and autonomously search the Web for images, capture and process these images to form probe queries, activate a search engine to compare the probe against a database gallery of missing children, and find the most probable matches between the probe and the gallery of missing children. As the search continues, the Missing Children Locator Agent system maintains and updates a list of best matches for each gallery image. A case manager can periodically access and review the resulting list of best matches for each missing child through a dynamically generated web-based user interface, over the Internet or an intranet.

As an additional feature, a user can submit an input probe image as a query, which may be entered remotely or over the Internet. The probe query will be compared with a database gallery of missing children. The user can inspect the closest matches between the query image and the best matches to missing children in the database gallery.

ANSER released a beta version of the Missing Children Locator Agent system for test and evaluation to the West Virginia Missing Children Clearinghouse in the Fall of 1999 as part of a pilot initiative with the West Virginia State Police Missing Clindren's Clearinghouse .

Other Law Enforcement Applications
A second application integrates the recognition components of this system with a digital booking system. A law enforcement officer could quickly query the booking system with images of suspects that have been captured on film or in artists' sketches based on eyewitness accounts. This system could be used in the field by equipping patrol cars and surveillance vans with digital cameras, laptop computers or digital terminals, and wireless communication equipment. Law enforcement officers could capture images of suspects and transmit those images back to the station to automatically query the booking system or other related systems. The top image matches would be returned in near-real time to the officer in the field, who could determine whether any outstanding warrants exist.