A sample application – tattoo forensics
Let's conclude this chapter with a real-life (or perhaps fantasy-life) example. Imagine you are working for the Gotham forensics department and you need to identify a tattoo. You have the original picture of a criminal's tattoo (perhaps captured in CCTV footage), but you don't know the identity of the person. However, you possess a database of tattoos, indexed with the name of the person that the tattoo belongs to.
Let's divide this task into two parts:
- Build a database by saving image descriptors to files
- Load the database and scan for matches between a query image's descriptors and the descriptors in the database
We will cover these tasks in the next two subsections.
Saving image descriptors to file
The first thing we will do is save the image descriptors to an external file. This way, we don't have to recreate the descriptors every time we want to scan two images for matches.
For the purposes of our example...
