A Multimedia Application for Location-Based Semantic Retrieval of Tattoos

The design and development of an automatic identity management system for the retrieval and matching of tattoo images is considered to be very important in the advancement of the investigative capabilities of forensics as well as law enforcement agencies. Conventional tattoo-based retrieval techniques are keyword-based, where content and body location meta-data are combined in an indistinguishable manner. However, the main drawback of these techniques is their inability to create search areas around manually annotated tattoo body location regions that can overcome user error in the meta-data or ambiguity in keywords. In this paper, we propose a novel method of using body location meta-data to perform semantic retrieval that significantly reduces error compared to keyword-based methods and reduces the number of matches needed to achieve high accuracy when performing tattoo-based human recognition. Our proposed approach is able to overcome the aforementioned challenges as well as other challenges that may be introduced when noise is present in the body location meta-data (e.g. possible tagging mistakes by the operators).