High-Tech Specs to Spot Terrorists?

May 28 -- If U.S. troops in Iraq want to spot Saddam Hussein, his sons or any of the former regime officials still wanted by coalition forces, for now they'll have to rely on a clever deck of playing cards.

But one day, rather than constantly referring to modified playing cards or old-fashioned "wanted posters," U.S. soldiers may be able to pick out the bad guys in a crowd just by looking through a pair of high-tech glasses.

For years, the Department of Defense has been funding the development of small computers and digital systems to enhance a soldier's visual capabilities on the battlefield. But researchers may have a system that could be put to use soon — if the Pentagon decides to continue funding the project, that is.

Called the Digital MP, and developed at the U.S. Army's Soldier System Center in Natick, Mass., along with various tech companies, it's a small, wearable computer system designed to act as a mobile security system for military police officers, or MPs.

Mobile Processors for Military Police

The Digital MP is a commercially available, portable computer that uses nothing more than a slightly modified version of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system — software commonly used on desktop PCs.

But at the heart of the system is an eyeglass-mounted camera and display system developed by MicroOptical Corp. in Westwood, Mass. The camera monitors what the soldier or MP sees, then feeds the images back to the belt-mounted computer.

The computer then scans the images for faces by using software developed by Identix Corp., formerly Visionics, in Jersey City, N.J. The company's software uses the same basic facial-recognition engine installed in Ybor City, Fla., more than two years ago to help spot criminals in public spaces.

The software is keyed to spot common facial features, such as the distance between a person's eyes and the corners of the mouth. Once those points are mapped, they can be compared mathematically to other faces — say, a digitized book of mug shots of most-wanted terrorists — stored in the computer.