Tag Archives: visionics

Early 1960s: Woody Bledsoe Pioneered Facial Recognition

While I first encountered facial recognition companies such as Viisage and Visionics (both now part of IDEMIA) in the late 1990s, the first attempts at computerized facial recognition were launched decades earlier. A Mobbeel LinkedIn article provides the history of how Woody Bledsoe pioneered facial recognition.

“Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe, a mathematician working in the 1960s, created a prototype using RAND tablets that made it possible to digitise facial features through electromagnetic coordinates. The system compared new images against a pre-existing database, laying the foundations for modern facial biometrics.

“Between 1964 and 1966, at Panoramic Research in Palo Alto, the project was completed by Helen Chan Wolf and Charles Bisson, co-authors of the technical report “A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System, Some Preliminary Results” (1965). The system was semi-automated: a person manually marked points such as the centre of the pupils or the corners of the eyes on a graphics tablet, at a rate of around 40 photographs per hour, and the computer calculated 20 normalised facial distances to compensate for head rotation, tilt and size. In subsequent tests involving more than 2,000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed human operators.”

For more details about this early work, and subsequent work on Eigenfaces in the 1990s, read the article.

For more on “Woody” Bledsoe, see this article in the History of Information.

“From 1964 to 1966 Woodrow W. Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson of Panoramic Research, Palo Alto, California, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database.”

The Most Significant Acquisitions in Biometrics…in 2002 and 2004. (Hang on to your seats.)

(Imagen 4)

What a difference a few years makes.

Identix plus Visionics (plus Digital Biometrics)

Back in 2002, when I was an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) product manager at Motorola, another fingerprint company, Identix, made an announcement.

“Identix Inc. and Visionics Corp. announce a strategic merger of equals in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $600 million.”

The word “synergy” was tossed about, justifiably. You see, while Identix had a long history with fingerprints, Visionics had a long history with facial recognition. So the new combined company would offer both fingerprint and face biometrics, something new for the time. So new that Visionics’ chairman and CEO, Dr. Joseph Atick, made the following statement:

“I believe this merger of equals is one of the most significant events in the history of the biometrics industry to date.”

One little footnote: the acquisition brought fingerprint provider Identix and its chief competitor Digital Biometrics into the same company, since Visionics had acquired Digital Biometrics in 2001.

Viisage plus TDT

Let’s, um, face it: the combined company (known as Identix) was positioned well against Visionics’ chief competitor, a company called Viisage.

But Viisage had plans of its own. Just two years later, it announced its own acquisition:

“In February, it bought Trans Digital Technologies (TDT), which supplies the digital printing system for U.S. passports, for $50 million in cash and stock. Last year, the Arlington, Va.-based TDT landed a five-year, $65 million contract extension with the U.S. State Department for the passport system.”

Which prompted Bernard Bailey, Viisage’s president and CEO, to declare that the acquisition of TDT was:

“…the single most important transformational event in Viisages history.”

So who was the true visionary: Atick, or Bailey? Or maybe someone else we haven’t mentioned yet?

Identix and Viisage…and all the other companies

While Identix and Visionics had some pretty significant components, neither could claim to be a true identity leader. Both companies not only had to compete against the traditional AFIS providers including Sagem Morpho and Motorola, but also against other identity providers. Take Digimarc, which beefed itself up considerably by acquiring Polaroid’s driver’s license business in 2001.

So by 2004, my Motorola “Biometric Business Unit” was competing against a bunch of companies, including:

  • One of our traditional AFIS competitors, Sagem Morpho.
  • Identix, including Visionics and Digital Biometrics.
  • Viisage, including Trans Digital Technologies.
  • Digimarc’s driver’s license business.

You know how this ended

Imagen 4.

Several years later, after several mergers (including the one that combined Identix and Viisage to form L-1 Identity Solutions, driven by Robert LaPenta’s L-1 Investment Partners who invested in Viisage), all of these companies would become part of the French aerospace company Safran.

  • Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit would be a Safran subsidiary called MorphoTrak (with some international pieces tossed over into a division that would subsequently be renamed Morpho).
  • The others (L-1 plus Digimarc’s driver’s license business, acquired in 2008) would be a Safran subsidiary called MorphoTrust.

Until Safran sold ALL of Morpho, including MorphoTrak and MorphoTrust, to the company that eventually became IDEMIA.