Expanding on the BRIAR Dataset: A Comprehensive Whole Body Biometric Recognition Resource at Extreme Distances and Real-World Scenarios (Collections 1-4)

The state-of-the-art in biometric recognition algorithms and operational systems has advanced quickly in recent years providing high accuracy and robustness in more challenging collection environments and consumer applications. However, the technology still suffers greatly when applied to non-conventional settings such as those seen when performing identification at extreme distances or from elevated cameras on buildings or mounted to UAVs. This paper summarizes an extension to the largest dataset currently focused on addressing these operational challenges, and describes its composition as well as methodologies of collection, curation, and annotation.

FaRO 2: an Open Source, Configurable Smart City Framework for Real-Time Distributed Vision and Biometric Systems

Recent global growth in the interest of smart cities has led to trillions of dollars of investment toward research and development. These connected cities have the potential to create a symbiosis of technology and society and revolutionize the cost of living, safety, ecological sustainability, and quality of life of societies on a world-wide scale. Some key components of the smart city construct are connected smart grids, self-driving cars, federated learning systems, smart utilities, large-scale public transit, and proactive surveillance systems. While exciting in prospect, these technologies and their subsequent integration cannot be attempted without addressing the potential societal impacts of such a high degree of automation and data sharing. Additionally, the feasibility of coordinating so many disparate tasks will require a fast, extensible, unifying framework. To that end, we propose FaRO2, a completely reimagined successor to FaRO1, built from the ground up. FaRO2 affords all of the same functionality as its predecessor, serving as a unified biometric API harness that allows for seamless evaluation, deployment, and simple pipeline creation for heterogeneous biometric software. FaRO2 additionally provides a fully declarative capability for defining and coordinating custom machine learning and sensor pipelines, allowing the distribution of processes across otherwise incompatible hardware and networks. FaRO2 ultimately provides a way to quickly configure, hot-swap, and expand large coordinated or federated systems online without interruptions for maintenance. Because much of the data collected in a smart city contains Personally Identifying Information (PII), FaRO2 also provides built-in tools and layers to ensure secure and encrypted streaming, storage, and access of PII data across distributed systems.