FASTID · FAST and efficient international disaster victim IDentification

An information management and decision support system for improved disaster victim identification (DVI) will be developed for crisis management. The system will speed up the correct identification of the injured and dead following disasters with multi-national victims Training methods for optimal DVI with the system will also be developed. The computer supported methodology will consist of a system to be used world wide which will provide automatic matching between missing persons and those discovered injured or dead. An expert will however still make the final confirmation given the seriousness of this task. The system and training methods will incorporate full consideration of different national, religious and cultural considerations of how to deal with the injured and dead as well as how best to name different identifiers used to match missing and found persons to optimise international cooperation. The system will support information sharing and cooperative planning across organisations and nations, also dynamically in an ongoing crisis. It will provide improvement with respect to performance, reliability, speed and cost. The project has been initiated by INTERPOL and the BKA (German Federal Criminal Police Office) after identifying PLASSDATA software as a good basis to start development. PLASSDATA will develop the core DVI system, two Fraunhofer Institutes and the University of Dundee will develop identification methods based on image retrieval and body modifications. Dundee will also lead the development of international operational commonality. Crabbe Consulting Ltd will support overall management and coordination. The results will be used by INTERPOL and as many of its 187 national member countries as possible. PLASSDATA foresees a return on its investment through the sales of DVI software and also products in other markets based on the knowledge it will develop in the project for the DVI system incl. Rich Internet Application (RIA) software.