A non-cooperative long-range biometric system for maritime surveillance

To address the challenges on non-cooperative long-distance human identification and verification, we propose an innovative cost-efficient system for automatic long-range biometric recognition of non-cooperative individuals in 24/7 operations. The system has three cameras. One is a wide field of view (WFOV) CCD video camera with an Infrared (IR) filter and powerful IR illuminators for human scan in a wide area at a long distance. The other two cameras are high resolution video cameras with narrow field of view (NFOV) and an IR filter & illuminators, mounted on a pan-tilt-unit (PTU) to capture the frontal view of human face and iris respectively. Once the frontal views of moving individuals are captured by the NFOV cameras, the face/iris models will be extracted and classified by the state-of-the-art face/iris recognizers. The hardware of the biometric system also includes one FPGA, three DSP processors, and one Zigbee module for fast bio-data analysis and wireless data transmission.