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To: steve h who wrote (41230)	12/1/1997 1:19:00 PM
From: derek cao	Respond to of 186894

steve, IBD just close the back door. Sorry about the inconvenient. You can register at IBD home page and gain access to the article. Here is the article itself: Photo I.D. Software Computes With Cops Date: 12/1/97 Author: Matt Krantz You've probably heard of software that cuts costs, but how about software that cuts crime? Detectives at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department last month installed software that matches drawings of crooks with photos of known criminals. Using the software, they've already arrested a carjacker in Artesia, Calif. ''We expect to have more successes,'' said Bill Conley, a sergeant in the department's Lakewood, Calif., station. The software is part of a suite of products made by San Diego-based ImageWare Software Inc. Instead of searching text, this database searches using digital drawings of suspects. It scours a photo database for near matches. Photos of suspects, their prior records and addresses are then displayed on the screen for police to browse. The department looked at other packages. It selected ImageWare because of its Suspect ID feature. Unlike rival products, Suspect ID allows detectives, not composite artists, to draw suspect sketches, says Conley. And the computer makes their inexpert sketches look like photographs, he adds. Success came quickly. In demonstrating the software in a training class, Conley decided to use a sketch from a real case. The software turned up a list of possible suspects that included someone whose address was near where police thought the perpetrator lived. Bingo. Eduardo ''Eddie'' Ochoa was arrested for the Sept. 22 carjacking, was charged and has since pleaded guilty, police say. The computer also came up with a number of former criminals who looked like Ochoa. The photos were put side by side on a monitor for the victims to look at a computerized ''lineup.'' They identified Ochoa. The sheriff's office uses four of ImageWare's five software crime-fighting packages. Suspect ID is used to draw composites and Face ID is used for the database search. Vehicle ID helps crime victims identify a car even if they can only remember a detail, say the grille or a wheel cover. And Crimelab is a painting program that lets police reconstruct photos of injured crime victims or remove possible disguises from a suspect's face. Each of the five software programs has a stand- alone price of $32,000. It runs on standard PCs. Finding a way to store the photo database was a challenge, says Conley. The department wanted to put a huge number of photos into the system. ''We've found that people work up to being serious criminals,'' Conley said. ''By the time someone is a serious criminal, they've probably visited us (been in jail), and we already have their photo.'' To store a photo database of 200,000 offenders, the department is buying a computer with the latest Intel Corp. Pentium II chip and a 12-gigabyte hard drive. ''The bigger the database of photos, the larger chance we have of success,'' Conley said. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (C) Copyright 1997 Investors Business Daily, Inc. derek