Trialing a smart face-recognition computer system to recognize lost people visiting the two holy mosques

Abstract EN

This paper describes an integrated recognition system for identifying faces of the people.

The work is intended to help recognizing lost, missing, dead, and found unknown people visiting the Grand Mosques during Hajj and Umrah seasons in the two Holy cities of Makkah and Medina in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The importance of this work is assumed increasing as the number of visitors will increase aiming to reach the total estimated number of pilgrims around 30 million as planned by the Saudi government in year 2030.

The proposed technique is tested by studying faces of 100 Hajj visiting people taken randomly from 25 countries where every person is pictured from different angles and in different situations and behaviors.

The different pictures built a new testing database specialized for the changes expected on faces due to Hajj & Umrah situations, which was named HUFRD (Hajj & Umrah Face Recognition Database).

The study gave interesting results.

It is just in its beginning phase where more accuracy as well as sophisticated image processing techniques would be involved for the promising future.