CIVIL WAR PHOTO SLEUTH

When Kurt Luther walked into Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center in 2013 to attend an exhibition about Pennsylvania during the Civil War, he didn’t expect to be greeted by his great-great-great-uncle. A computer scientist and Civil War enthusiast, Luther had been drawn to researching his own family’s connection to the conflict, gradually piecing together information over years and years. But his searches had always failed to turn up a photograph, and Luther was ready to give up on the possibility of ever seeing his ancestors’ faces. It was only through sheer happenstance that, walking through the History Center that day, Luther had spotted an album of portraits of the men of Company E, 134th Pennsylvania––his great-great-great-uncle’s unit. Laying eyes on his relative’s face for the first time, he later wrote, felt like “closing a gap of 150 years.”

Five years later, Luther launched Civil War Photo Sleuth, a web platform dedicated to closing the gap a little further. Together with Ron Coddington (editor of the magazine Military Images), Paul Quigley (director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies), and a group of student researchers at Virginia Tech, Luther crafted a free and easy-to-use website that applies facial recognition to the multitude of anonymous portraits that survive from the conflict, in the hopes of identifying the sitter. When a user uploads a photograph, the software maps up to 27 distinct “facial landmarks.” Users are further able to refine their searches by adding filters for uniform details that could offer clues about rank. (Three chevrons and a star, for instance, indicates a rank of ordnance sergeant for both the Union and Confederate armies, while shoulder straps with an eagle were worn by Union colonels.) From there, the program cross-references the photo with the other images in CWPS’s growing database. The final search results present an array of possible matches (and possible names) for consideration.

“The beauty of CWPS,” he says, “is that the more people use it, the more information gets added, leading to more identifications—it’s a virtuous cycle.” In the site’s first month alone, CWPS logged 88 reported identifications, of which 75 were “probably or definitely correct” (and since not all users choose to publicize their identifications, Luther thinks that the real number of matches may have been higher). Given that IDs like this are otherwise rare enough that they make national news when they occur, this is a massive leap forward.

One particularly memorable ID occurred the night before CWPS’s launch in August, as Luther was searching for a sample image for the next day’s demo. After selecting an unidentified portrait from the Library of Congress to demonstrate how to upload and tag photos, Luther ran it through the program. The very first result was a perfect match. More digging turned up yet another portrait of the same sitter, this time with an autograph: Francis Marion Eveleth, assistant surgeon in the 7th Maine Infantry. When Luther presented the match at the launch event the next day, Tom Liljenquist, the man who had donated the photograph to the Library of Congress, was in attendance.

To read the complete article, see:
Who’s Behind That Beard? (https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/civil-war-photo-sleuth-facial-recognition.html)

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