For thousands of parents across the country trying to find missing children, hope may ride on warped polygons.
Polygons are the building blocks of a computer software program being developed by two medical illustrators at the University Illinois at Chicago campus. If all goes according to plan, the scientists by the first of the year will be using the program to generate near photo-quality, ”aged”
illustrations of missing children.
Since 1985, Lewis Sadler and Scott Barrows have been the only people in the country using medical and anthropological information on how children`s faces age to produce hand-drawn illustrations; sort of a portrait of Dorian Gray with a happy twist. But when the art of Sadler and Barrows goes ”on line,” the time to produce an age-progressed illustration will shrink to about 20 minutes from 20 hours.
The bottom line for parents, said Sadler, a father of four, is hope.
”Before we started doing this, if a child had been missing for a long time, there was really little incentive to look,” he explained. ”Now there will be.
”This gives parents hope because they didn`t have anything to use to identify the long-term cases. The second thing about this program, and maybe more important, is that it keeps the interest level high and helps get these drawings out all over the world. You just don`t know where these kids have gone.”
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington has open files on more than 7,500 missing children.
”If I were doing that many by hand, it would take years, if not a lifetime,” Barrows said. ”So the speed factor will really help.”
Since 1985, the artists have produced 81 illustrations. Twenty-two of those children have been found, nine because of the age-progressed
illustrations.
John Rabin, deputy director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said Sadler and Barrows` computer program will
revolutionize the search for children.
”The new system will vastly enhance our ability to do anything,” Rabin said. ”It`s like going from a quill pen to state-of-the-art equipment. The speed alone is going to be amazing.”
The original hand-drawn illustrations drew national attention in 1985 after Sadler and Barrows aged pictures of Kathleen and Deborah Caruso. The photos, 7 1/2 years old, were aged to progress Kathleen from 5 to 13 years old and Deborah from 7 to 15.
Twenty minutes after the drawings were aired during a national television documentary, the sisters, abducted by their father while visiting his home in Villa Park, were identified by neighbors and school officials in Kettering, Ohio.
”It`s a terrible problem,” said Janet Hicks, the mother of the Carusos, in the documentary. ”You`re sending out pictures of children who were 5 and 7, who are now maturing and are teenagers. You can`t find them or have someone help you find them unless you have something better to work with.”
The aging technique uses data collected by physical anthropologists, dentists and plastic surgeons. The data provide information on the average growth of a young human face at 48 ”anatomical landmarks,” such as the distance between the eyes and between the corners of the mouth. Human speed was the only handicap.
But on April 20, the door to computerization was opened to Sadler and Barrows when American Telephone & Telegraph Co. granted them $1.3 million to develop a software program to age photos and to support six research assistants who will produce the illustrations.
The grant, along with $500,000 raised by the university, should get the program running on schedule, Sadler said. When completed, the project will fill an entire wing in the U. of I. Department of Family Practices Building on Taylor Street.
The computerized drawing begins when an outdated photograph is scanned by a laser that transfers the image to the computer system. In seconds the photo, scaled to conform with the software program, will emerge on the screen. The illustrator will ask the computer for facial data on children at the age when the photo was taken and on children at the age to which the photo is to be progressed.
Sadler said the computer will break the face from the photograph into about 100 polygons: multisided geometric shapes. With a light pen, the illustrator then makes points on the screen to show where the anatomical landmarks from the average face would have moved during a certain period of time. Once these points are locked into the system, the computer ”rubber bands” the polygons, warping the shapes to define the new, aged image.
Each polygon carries gene-like information on skin color, texture and shading. When the computer-generated image is complete, the illustrator can use another software program to add unpredictable features, such as braces, hairstyle and facial weight. Sadler said the program can quickly produce yearly updates if the child is not found.
”This system won`t just spit out a new picture,” he added. ”You can`t access this software and do it with youhe computer produces a mirror-like image of the child at his or her current age, the effort is lost if the picture is not widely distributed.
”The weak link is distribution,” Barrows said. ”We can be as accurate as necessary, but if the pictures don`t get out there to the people, they`re not going to do any good.”
Here again, the computer may have the answer. Barrows said the new system allows the illustrator to send the photos via telephone lines. The plan is to send the illustrations to state clearinghouses, such as the Illinois State Police I-Search program, which in turn forwards the pictures on to local police agencies.
”From the clearinghouses, the age-progressed drawing can go right into police squad cars, because a lot of sqe drawback to the system is that because of the limited focus of the information on anatomical landmarks, it deals almost exclusively with Caucasian children. Dimensions of anatomical features, such as width of the nose, vary among races. Though information exists on minority children, Sadler said, there is not always enough to get an accurate age progression. State law enforcement statistics from 1986, the most recent available, indicate that about 50 percent of missing children are black.
Sadler and Barrows` drawings had not been the key ingredient in locating a minority child until the case of Gina Reyes in September, 1985. Gina, a Mexican-American girl, was abducted in 1980 from Addison by her father.
Five years passed before Addison police received a tip that the girl may have been enrolled in an Elgin school. Barrows was called in to ”age” a snapshot taken of Gina at age 2. The illustration, depicting Gina as she would look at age 8, was circulated to a number of Elgin schools but with no luck.
At one of the final Elgin schools, a girl saw the illustration on a teacher`s desk and recognized the child in the picture as a playmate. Police followed the girl`s information and found Gina at a school in Chicago.
”I had no idea who I was looking for with the old photo,” said Cmdr. Timothy Hayden of the Addison Police Department. Hayden, in charge of the Reyes investigation, contacted Barrows through the state police`s I-Search program.
”Scott`s picture was fantastic,” he said. ”Without it, I wouldn`t have had any idea who Gina was if she was standing right in front of me.”
As the project develops, Sadler and Barrows will buy a low-powered laser called the ECHO system. The laser rotates around the human skull, analyzing 20,000 pieces of data each second. Sadler said the laser will pick up 256,000 bits of information about a head and will be used to expand the data base on minority children.
”It may turn out we will have better information on the ethnic groups and we`ll probably have to go and do the Caucasians” with the new system, he said. ”It`s really cutting-edge equipment.”
”It`s a change of speed, reliability and verifiability,” Rabin said.
”The potential to locate missing children over the next few years will be phenomenal. It`s going to enliven each one of these cases. They`ll be alive for a change.”
