Professor’s Biometrics Surveillance to Tackle Security Challenge
Identifying a terrorist traveling incognito among passengers in a crowded, busy airport can be a security challenge akin to looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
An Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) professor has received a $300,000 military grant to develop a video surveillance system for homeland security that uses a biometrics data technique - iris recognition - to identify suspects seeking to avoid detection.
Yingzi (Eliza) Du, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI is one of 33 recipients of the prestigious 2007 Office of Naval Research Young Investigators award.
Under a three-year Young Investigators award project titled "Selective Feature Based Iris Recognition for Non-cooperative User Identification," Du will research and design software that would make it possible to monitor and identify terrorists and other criminals covertly in real time using the patterns of the irises of their eyes.
Such iris recognition "provides a new means for surveillance and terrorist watch. It is expected to have a significant impact on the military, homeland security, and intelligence, such as border control, monitoring insurgent/terrorist/criminal activities, and remotely identifying people," says Du, whose research expertise areas include biometrics, digital image processing, pattern recognition, and their applications.
The use of biometrics - fingerprints, face patterns, and eye or iris patterns - is becoming more convenient and secure compared to traditional methods of identification and verification imperative to security, intelligence, law enforcement and e-commerce.
"Dr. Du's research is in an interdisciplinary area where electrical engineering, computer engineering, and biological sciences play important roles," says Dr. H. Öner Yurtseven, dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI. "The resulting technology designed and developed based on her research has strategic and far reaching implications for homeland security."
Among the three most used biometrics data, iris recognition "is the most accurate," Du said. "Your fingerprint is not that accurate because the fingerprint does not have enough information … face patterns are not stable and are not that unique."
Because the patterns of each of a person's irises are unique, iris recognition is a more accurate and reliable form of biometrics identification.
"However, there is no iris recognition system that can perform positive human identification in video surveillance," Du said. In addition, the challenge is to identify a suspect who may be facing away from the camera because off-angle iris images are often captured out of focus or with motion blur.
Du's proposed system will automatically select iris patterns with sufficient quality to recognition. The captured patterns will be compared to those on file in a database of known subjects.
This system can also be adopted for cooperative user identification, and since it can work with low quality images, it can help to stretch the range of regular iris recognition systems, Du said.
According to Dr. Yaobin Chen, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at IUPUI, the Young Investigators award is an extremely competitive and prominent award on the national level. The department and School of Engineering and Technology are very proud of Du for her accomplishments and look forward to the contributions she will make as a future leader in research, Chen said.
Additional information about ONR Young Investigators, including a complete list of 2007 grant recipients, can be found at http://www.onr.navy.mil/sci_tech/3t/corporate/yip.asp.
Du earned her doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. Additional information about Du can be found at http://purdue.iupui.edu/~yidu/.
Go to www.engr.iupui.edu to learn more about the School of Engineering and Technology.
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