Incorporating Graph-Based Models in a Deep Learning Framework for Operational Face Recognition

This award was competitively made in response to a proposal submitted by Michigan State University to a National Institute of Justice FY 2015 solicitation: “Graduate Research Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics.” With this solicitation, NIJ sought applications for funding innovative doctoral dissertation research in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics that is relevant to providing solutions to better ensure public safety, prevent and control crime, and ensure the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States. The ultimate goal of this solicitation is to increase the pool of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields who are involved in research relevant to criminal justice applications. In its application, Michigan State University proposes to improve the process of automated face recognition by wrapping into the process demographic information such as known associates, gender and social networking data. This application proposes a graph-based approach in which gallery images are used to generate a powerful network structure where the nodes correspond to individual identities (and consist of face images as well as biographic attributes such as gender, ethnicity, name, etc.) and the edge weights define the degree of similarity between two such nodes. It is proposed that this network can be used in several different ways: (a) to create clusters of identities based on graph clustering algorithms; (b) to predict the biographic and demographic attributes of an unknown probe image based on label propagation schemes; (c) to perform rapid recognition by restricting the search to only a fraction of the nodes in the graph; and (d) to infer missing information in nodes based on adjacent nodes that have strong edges. This project is being funded incrementally in 3 phases, with the effort funded in FY15 representing the first phase. This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law. ca/ncf