Among various soft biometric traits, tattoos, in particular, have received substantial attention over the past several years due to their prevalence among the criminal section of the population and their saliency in visual attention.  However, in many cases, the tattoo image of a suspect may not be available (e.g., scenarios without surveillance cameras). In these circumstances, just like a face sketch [1], a sketch of a tattoo can be drawn based on the description provided by an eyewitness or the victim.

This dataset is built for the research for matching  tattoo sketches to tattoo images. A tattoo image was first shown to a subject for one minute. Ten minutes later, the subject was asked to draw a tattoo sketch (a line drawing image) on a white paper according to his/her memory. The current data set consists of 100 tattoo sketches drawn by two different subjects, each sketch has a corresponding tattoo image, which is provided by the Michigan State Police (MSP).

Please cite as:
Hu Han and Anil K. Jain, "Tattoo Based Identification: Sketch to Image Matching", ICB, Madrid, Spain, June 4-7, 2013. 


[1] Hu Han, Brendan Klare, Kathryn Bonnen, Anil K. Jain: Matching Composite Sketches to Face Photos: A Component-Based Approach. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 8(1): 191-204 (2013).