Finding lost children

Abstract

During a disaster, children may be quickly wrenched from their families. Research shows that children in such circumstances are often unable or unwilling to give their names or other identifying information. Currently in the US, there is no existing system in the public health infrastructure that effectively expedites reunification when children can't be identified. Working with the Children's Hospital Boston, we have engineered a system to speed reunification of children with their families, should they get separated in a disaster. Our system is based on a Content Based Image Retrieval and attribute search. In this paper we will describe the system and a series of evaluations, including a realistic disaster drill set up and run jointly with the Children's Hospital.