Excerpt from Computer Design

April 1992
FUZZY MUG SEARCH HELPS COPS CATCH CROOKS
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Well known to all devotees of detective shows is the scene where

a crime victim sits for long hours paging through mug books to
try to identify some evildoer. Even when police departments
have managed to computerize their databases of known
perpetrators, the process of narrowing the identification search
to a manageable number of mug shots based on a witness's
description is a tedious one.

Knowledge Based Systems of White Plains, NY added a fuzzy front

end to the image database of a major European police department
that significantly reduced the number of look throughs witnesses
had to do before finding a set of pictures they could seriously
work with to try to identify a subject. In the past, if someone
came in and said, ``He was kind of tall and heavy-set and looked
rather young,'' the police would have only a vague idea of what
group of pictures to start showing the witness. Even if the
system were computerized, someone would have to decide where the
cutoff point was for ``rather young,'' or ``tall.'' If a person
were described at 6'1'' but was really 5'11'', the system might
not catch the out of range number even if other factors in the
description pointed to an overall match.

In addition to implementing a front end to the database that

uses fuzzy sets to describe characteristics like ``old,''
``thin,'' ``tall'' and so on, KBS built in what it calls
``perspective shifting'' and ``semantic plies.'' Perspective
shifting changes the shape of the fuzzy set representing, say,
``tall'' if the witness is for instance a 16-year-old girl or
Japanese. It allows the system to search for ``old'' from a
``young'' perspective. Semantic plies adjust the description as
in ``tall for women'' or ``heavy for Samoans.''

The success of searching for a useful set of mug shots to

examine is because perspective shifting and semantic plies
affect the degree of belief in a fuzzy concept based on the
witness's characteristics; they do not make crisp distinctions.
Thus 5 feet will have a greater degree of membership in ``tall'
for a 10-year-old than for an adult, etc. The pictures of
subjects to look at are selected on an overall degree of truth
from the combined described characteristics, which in this
instance was set at 0.38. According to KBS, the old system
required an average of 16 look-throughs to find a set that
someone could actually work with, while the fuzzy system reduced
the number of look-throughs to two.

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