What’s in a face? Aerospace Collaborates with Students to Use
Computer Technology to ID Characteristics
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (3/15/06) -- Our unique facial characteristics are the focus of a collaborative project between The Aerospace Corporation and students from Harvey Mudd College, located in Claremont, California.
The project is called High Performance Biometric Face Recognition via Grid Computing Technology. The students recently shared the technical computing challenges of the project and their progress with members of The Aerospace Corporation's technical staff. The college students are participants in The Aerospace Institute’s Corporate University Affiliates Program (CUAP) Computer Science Clinic.
Biometrics is the use of one-of-a-kind biological features such as facial, fingerprint, DNA, and gait characteristics for strong authentication of personal identity.
The project examines real-time face recognition from streaming videos that contain persons of interest whose faces are stored in a watch list database. Because this is a computationally intensive task, the Aerospace Harvey Mudd team is looking to leverage grid computing, using many computers simultaneously, to expedite identification of facial characteristics.
The team of students conducted a design review in January 2006 at Aerospace and presented technical accomplishments and plans to complete the project and present the final results during Projects Day at the college on May 2 and at The Aerospace Corporation shortly afterwards.
Dr. Willie Krenz, general manager of The Aerospace Corporation's Computers and Software Division (CSD), welcomed the team and expressed his appreciation for the collaborative work that the team is doing through the Institute’s program.
The clinic’s emphasis this year is the introduction of a homeland security application in the biometrics area. CSD is supporting Civil and Commercial Operations projects as well as the National Reconnaissance Office. The Institute provides CUAP support to ETG.
“We launched a project where a team grid enables a biometric application while using SwitchBlade, grid technology developed at Aerospace,” said Dr. Joe Betser, senior project leader in CSD. “In addition to providing the new grid features to the application, the team will use face-recognition algorithms and document the lessons learned from grid-enabling a homeland security application that was not originally built for grid computing,” he said.
The team continued to lead the project through weekly teleconference calls, e-mails, information sharing over the Internet, and a number of face-to-face meetings at Harvey Mudd College and at The Aerospace Corporation.
The Harvey Mudd team was introduced to Aerospace in September 2005 when a broad set of topics was discussed, including the Global Positioning System, biometrics, social networks, and parallel and grid computing.
CUAP is designed to develop strong technical relationships among The Aerospace Corporation and selected universities. Through the exchange of technical information, expertise, and research, the program fosters unique partnerships among university faculty, students and members of the corporation's technical staff. The program also provides students with an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the corporation early in their academic careers through their participation in joint technical research activities and programs.
The Aerospace Corporation, with headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., is an independent, nonprofit company that provides objective technical analyses and assessments for national security space programs and selected civil and commercial space programs in the national interest.
Media Information: contact Dave Jonta, 310-336-5041, david.l.jonta@aero.org
