Facial recognition software to identify Civil War soldiers

Kurt Luther, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science, has developed a free software platform that uses crowdsourcing to significantly increase the ability of algorithms to identify faces in photos.

Through the software platform, called Photo Sleuth, Luther seeks to uncover the mysteries of the nearly 4 million photographs of Civil War-era images that may exist in the historical record.

Luther will present his research surrounding the Photo Sleuth platform on March 19 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Los Angeles, California. He will also demonstrate Photo Sleuth at the grand opening of the expanded American Civil War Museum, in Richmond, Virginia, on May 4, 2019.

Luther, a history buff himself, was inspired to develop the software for Civil War Photo Sleuth in 2013 while visiting the Heinz History Center's exhibit called "Pennsylvania's Civil War" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he stumbled upon a Civil War-era portrait of Oliver Croxton, his great-great-great uncle who served in Company E of the 134th Pennsylvania, clad in a corporal's uniform.