Facial Recognition Tech Evolves to Recognize Places

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Facial recognition seems to be everywhere these days. And now, the same technology is going to be used to identify places, not people, and hopefully help combat terrorism.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity(IARPA), a research division of the U.S. military, is working on new software that will identify the location of photographs, much like facial recognition recognizes your friends' faces on Facebook. The project, called Finder, seeks to help in hunting down terrorism suspects in photographs, even when no GPS metadata is available.

If the military wants to get an idea of where a photograph was taken, a rather arduous process ensues: over a long period of time, highly trained professionals try and match backgrounds to known areas. You can imagine how time-consuming that must be. This is why the Finder project seeks to automate that process as much as possible, making it faster and easier.

In the end, military officials could use the program to cross-reference a whole series of images off of an extremist website or message board, and then figure out where they were taken.