Genetic Algorithm Helps Identify Criminals 84
Ponca City, We love you writes to tell us that a new software approach to police sketch artists is finding surprising success in a trial run of 15 police departments in the UK and a few other sites. The software borrows principles from evolution with an interactive genetic algorithm that progressively changes as witnesses try to remember specific details. Current field trials are reporting an increase in successful identification by as much as double conventional methods. A short video with a few working shots of the new "EFIT-V" system is also available on YouTube. "[Researcher Christopher Solomon]'s software generates its own faces that progressively evolve to match the witness' memories. The witness starts with a general description such as 'I remember a young white male with dark hair.' Nine different computer-generated faces that roughly fit the description are generated, and the witness identifies the best and worst matches. The software uses the best fit as a template to automatically generate nine new faces with slightly tweaked features, based on what it learned from the rejected faces. 'Over a number of generations, the computer can learn what face you're looking for,' says Solomon. The mathematics underlying the software is borrowed from Solomon's experience using optics to image turbulence in the atmosphere in the 1990s."
Re:What's genetic about that? (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm [wikipedia.org] ?
The word 'genetic' itself has nothing to do with DNA.
GA vs. Hillclimbing (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing and not using a proper GA. This seems to be something that the EigenFit package does.
TFA says that up to six faces may be "bred" together resulting in a new generation, which would indeed be genetic, so the EvoFit package seems to be genuinely genetic.
TFA is unsurprisingly short on details, but it seems to me that EigenFit is using hillclimbing (at least partially) while EvoFit is using shotgun-genetic.
Re:What's genetic about that? (Score:1, Informative)
"Genetic algorithms are a particular class of evolutionary algorithms (EA) that use techniques inspired by evolutionary biology such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover." [wikipedia.org]
Better version.... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.20q.net/startg_enUS.html [20q.net]
Re:Does it swim? (Score:4, Informative)
Algorithm wonks please correct me if I've got it all wrong, but... I believe a binary search is only performed on a sorted list of items. What you're describing sounds more like a well-trained decision tree.
In a similar manner there's pages out there in the triple-dub that ask you questions in an attempt to guess what fictional tv/movie character you're thinking of. It is trained by the very people who are "playing" the game so that at the end, if the program did not guess correctly, you can enter your answer. And provided you haven't been giving bogus data, you're helping to provide training data which makes the decision tree even stronger.
Re:What's genetic about that? (Score:3, Informative)
The word 'genetic' predates the discovery of DNA: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=genetic [etymonline.com]
Re:GA vs. Hillclimbing (Score:5, Informative)
This method could be modified to avoid the prompting problem. Essentially the entire test can be buried in noise (i.e., random faces) so that the subject is never aware of the convergence process. It should also be possible to modify it to detect when the subject has insufficient information to identify the target. These sorts of techniques are quite common in experimental psychology when you need to suppress adaptation effects or do testing for medical purposes where the subject can't be trusted to be truthful.