The project seeks to further enhance the capabilities of the tattoo matching software licensed to Morpho in 2009 by the university’s Pattern Recognition and Image Processing (PRIP) Laboratory.

Merging the cutting-edge software acquired from Professor Anil K. Jain’s laboratory at MSU with Morpho core knowledge and enhancements, Morpho was able to produce a state-of-the-art tattoo matching solution. The solution uses features such as tattoo colour, shape and texture to assist in automatic identification of individuals by matching a query tattoo against large collections of tattoo images stored in police databases.

Morpho expects that this new project will lead to the development of advanced tattoo identification and analysis techniques for criminal investigations.

"The fusion of the technology we licensed from MSU and Morpho’s core matching capabilities provides our law enforcement customers with an innovative tool to combat crime at both federal and state levels," stated Daniel Vassy, president and CEO of MorphoTrak, a U.S. subsidiary of Morpho."With this new venture, we intend to take tattoo recognition to a new level, beyond person identification, thereby enabling police forces to use this technology to gather intelligence for complex investigations.”

Anil K. Jain, University Distinguished Professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University, said “Morpho has been supporting our research lab for more than five years through various technology partnerships and I am delighted to see the results of our research being put to work in law enforcement applications. This is a great example of mutually beneficial collaboration between industry and academia to advance the state of the art in biometrics.”