Thursday, January 4, 2007

Database biometrics support help Motorola fight crime

The different ways technology is being used to help fight crime continues to amaze me as I read this article today: Oracle 10g, biometrics help Motorola fight crime
Motorola products, as seen in CSI, used for finger prints, palm prints etc are power by the Oracle 10g database. The database allows saving the images of the finger prints and the associated textual data with search capabilities. Increasing the database is becoming a content management system where the image and textual content can be securely stored for quick retrieval using querying tools. Apart from fingerprints, nowadays tongue and iris recognition are also other biometrics in use these days. Disney has used the two finger scans for a while for preventing multiple guests using the same ticket or misuse of its annual passes.

Similarly, the mug shots and crime scene images used by the law enforcement agencies can now be stored inside the database. These images can be searched based on the textual annotations or even by image data mining. As long as there are easy to use Graphic user interfaces and performant databases at the back-end driving these, the detectives and the other law enforcement officers will be willing to give these technolgies a shot in crime analysis. Oracle Corp. provides such an application suite called Oracle Protect for Law Enforcement that can be used for Crimestats (crime reporting), Crime analysis using the geo-spatial display of crime and the pattern search using the Oracle data mining.

Will the computers become the new Sherlock Homles eventually?

1 comment:

Empoprises said...

Nine years is a long time.

Motorola got out of the biometrics business years ago (the business was sold to Safran and is now part of MorphoTrak), but MorphoTrak is still using Oracle databases and their data management capabilities.

The management of data is a challenging issue, as biometric systems are increasingly becoming part of larger criminal justice solutions (Motorola worked on that also, but it never really took off with biometrics).