Video Biometric Surveillance and Forensic Image Analysis

In this paper, we describe two research projects involving the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DIEE) of the University of Cagliari. They are related to the applications of biometrics for environmental video-surveillance and forensic sciences. In the first one, entitled “Procedure for Object Recognition and Processing of Multi-Input Images� (PRiO), the DIEE people has been involved as consultant of the company Vitrociset S.p.A.. The second one, entitled “State of the art on methods and algorithms for automatic analysis of fingerprint images and for fake fingerprints identification�, is in the context of an agreement between DIEE and Scientific Investigation Office (Ra.C.I.S.) of “Arma dei Carabinieri� (the militia maintained by the Italian government for police duties). The PRiO project is focused on the development of an intelligent system of sensors for the control of wide reserved areas. The sensors can interact each others in order to capture the presence of living objects in the scene (cars or humans), tracking the subject identity after passing through a proximity biometric verification system, and to signal some unusual situations to a human operator. The system is also able to program some counter-measures on the basis of models managed by a tactical simulation software. The role of DIEE consists in the development of some fundamentals modules of the project: a proximity biometric verification systems based on faces and fingerprints, a module for ancillary information extraction from a tracked subject (height, gait speed), and also to discriminate between cars and humans into a scene. The Ra.C.I.S. project lies in the development of a set of software modules aimed to process and compare latent fingerprint images, and also a prototype module which helps the human expert to discriminate latent fingerprints released by a live finger from those released by a fake finger.