United States Iarpa Tender

The Office of the Director of National Intelligences ODNI Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity IARPA seeks information on private sector research efforts and datasets that may be useful in planning a program focused on advancing the state-of-the-art of biometric recognition and identification at altitude and range BRIAR.The Request for Information RFI was issued only for planning purposes and does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals. It stated that over the past five years there have been notable advances in computer vision and biometric approaches to facilitate unconstrained face recognition in which the pose illumination and expression of the subjects is not controlled or limited.According to the ODNI However there remains challenges in diverse face detection verification and identification when dealing with low-resolution or noisy imagery e.g. motion blur atmospheric turbulence. In addition limited research has been performed on face recognition using imagery captured at high camera pitch angles such as those collected from security cameras on building tops or from airborne platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles which is primarily due to a lack of authorized and sharable research data that represents this type of imagery.IARPAs Janus Program and its resulting research is an example of such recent advances said the ODNI.Main objective of Janus Program of the ODNI is to dramatically improve the current performance of facial recognition technology by fusing the rich spatial temporal and contextual information available from the multiple views captured by todays media in the wild in order to move beyond largely two-dimensional image matching methods used currently into more model-based matching that fuses all views from whatever video and stills are available.According to IARPA that data volume is an integral part of the solution instead of an oppressive burden.Janus has been funding what IARPA describes as rigorous high-quality research which uses innovative and promising approaches drawn from a variety of fields to develop novel representational models capable of encoding the shape texture and dynamics of a face.Objective of the Janus initiative is to move away from reliance on a single best frame approach and toward addressing the challenges of Aging Pose Illumination and Expression A-PIE by exploiting all available imagery.IARPA said Technologies must support analysts working with partial information by addressing the uncertainties which arise when working with possibly incomplete erroneous and ambiguous data.The goal of the program is to test and validate techniques which have the potential to significantly improve the performance of biometric recognition in unconstrained imagery and to that end the program will involve empirical testing of recognition performance across unconstrained videos camera stills and scanned photos exhibiting a broad range of real-world imaging conditions.