Mohawk College researcher identifying veterans through AI technology

A Mohawk College researcher and his students are teaming up with the National Air Force Museum of Canada with a goal of preserving national military history by using AI technology to identify veterans in old photos.

Stephen Adams, a computer science professor at Mohawk College, embarked on a quest to find photos of his grandfather, Stephen Barret.

Barret was a fisherman in Newfoundland, who served in the Royal Navy overseas. He worked his way up to gunner on a minesweeping ship called H.M.T. Imperialist.

“That was a nightmare. It took days and days of searching and I thought, there’s got to be a better way to do this.” Adams said of the search.

He described thousands of pictures wrapped up in the museum archives that aren’t labeled.

“The motivation for this project is to take AI tools and to be able to automatically label these or at least get some confidence of what the label should be.”

Adams is aiming to launch a website called “Remembering Their Faces”, to allow for people to search, upload and share digital artifacts to honour our Canadian heroes.

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“We are losing World War Two veterans every year, pretty soon the war will pass out of living memory and all we’ll have is these recollections.” explains Adams.

There are 12 students working on the project, including Jin Zhang, who has a military background.

“I think it’s important to conserve a lot of our history and for people who have family members that have served or were involved historically war related.” says Zhang.

One group of students is working on identifying aircrafts through AI, while another focuses on the colorization of black and white photos and how this will affect the quality of facial matches.

“It’s a blast getting hands-on experience seeing how to do that and apply these technologies on a real project versus the traditional classroom environment.” says software development student Anthony Mercadante.

While it hasn’t launched yet, those interested can visit the website to sign up and receive notifications once it goes live.

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