The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.
Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.
“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”
Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.
As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”
Hellbound and Down 