Tattoo-ID: Automatic Tattoo Image Retrieval for Suspect & Victim Identification

Tattoos are used by law enforcement agencies for identification of a victim or a suspect using a false identity. Current method for matching tattoos is based on human-assigned class labels that is time consuming, subjective and has limited performance. It is desirable to build a Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system for automatic matching and retrieval of tattoos. The authors examine several key design issues related to building a prototype CBIR system for tattoo image database. Their system computes the similarity between the query and stored tattoos based on image content to retrieve the most similar tattoos.