A preliminary report on a full-body imaging system for effectively collecting and processing biometric traits of prisoners

Because of recent advances in imaging technology, the use of image-based evidences, such as faces and tattoos, is increasing dramatically. Face and tattoo images of prisoners are collected regularly for suspect image database establishment. New biometric traits such as skin marks, androgenic hairs, and blood vessels hidden in color images are getting more attention because they are shown to be useful for criminal and victim identification, especially when their faces and tattoos are neither observable nor available. The current manual approach of collecting images of prisoners is extremely time consuming and does not record these new biometric traits. To address this problem, an unprecedented full-body imaging system is developed. Furthermore, an automatic and systematic routine based on the system for effectively collecting prisoners' images is proposed. This paper concentrates on the system hardware design as well as its image collecting and processing capability. The system has been used to collect and process more than 30,000 infrared and color images from 188 subjects. Its performance is very encouraging.