Graffiti deciphering app

August 22, 2011

Purdue University researchers are developing a smartphone app that would decipher gang graffiti to aid law enforcement agencies. The app, Gang Graffiti Automatic Recognition and Interpretation (GARI), lets a person take a picture of the graffiti and also records the date, time, and coordinates. “The phone analyzes features, then sends the information over the Internet to a server to compare with data in the graffiti database,” the Boston Herald Reports. The project idea came from a computer engineering professor’s work translating foreign character sets. Analyzing gang graffiti helps track gang affiliation, growth, and gang membership information.