Getting Soft(ware) on Crime

For three weeks, Lakewood sheriff’s detectives believed that the carjacking and battery case was unsolvable--no leads and no evidence. Then they installed FaceID, a new facial recognition software program released in October.

Within 90 seconds, the software matched the suspect’s composite with photographs from the booking database of Los Angeles County.

After two witnesses positively identified the suspect from a photo lineup, detectives arrested Eduardo Ochoa, 27, of Norwalk, who pleaded guilty to robbery on Nov. 12 and was sentenced to five years in state prison.

“This could be as big as fingerprints,” said Sgt. Bill Conley, a supervising detective at the Lakewood substation, the first in the nation to install FaceID. From a state grant, the Sheriff’s Department paid $21,000 for FaceID and three accompanying programs.

San Diego-based ImageWare Software Inc. created FaceID in conjunction with Viisage Technology, a Littleton, Mass., firm. Tracy Toettcher, ImageWare’s marketing manager, said the program was based on algorithms developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Viisage uses the same software engines that are used to identify welfare and driver’s license frauds--products released in mid-1996.

“We met with Viisage folks and had the idea to marry their technology with crime software,” said ImageWare President Jim Miller. Founded in 1987, ImageWare started out as a photo-booth operator, and after developing Image Wizard, a graphics-editing program, the company decided to adapt the software to law enforcement and the public sector, Toettcher said.

FaceID enables law enforcement officials to compare pictures--composites, scanned still photos or surveillance camera images--with photos from a database. Los Angeles County, which now uses digital cameras to take booking photos, has about 200,000 pictures in its database.

“We don’t arrest someone based on what the computer says, Conley said. “If we find a match, it’s placed in a photo lineup, like we always have.”

Since the arrest of Ochoa, dozens of agencies have contacted the Lakewood station and ImageWare.