Finding Fido

How a computer algorithm could help locate your lost pet

There’s a potentially powerful new tool to help reunite pet owners with their lost cats and dogs — facial recognition technology.

The Baltimore Animal Rescue & Care Shelter announced Thursday that it is the first organization locally to use sophisticated computer algorithms that can let pet owners know almost instantly whether their missing Fido or Fluffy is at the organization’s shelter or in its network of foster homes.

John Polimeno, the California retired construction executive who founded the free service Finding Rover, said that he spent a year working with specialists at the University of Utah to develop facial recognition software to analyze the faces of dogs and cats, which are more difficult for the technology to identify than are the faces of their human counterparts. Finding Rover’s software program measures 138 features of an animal’s face and compares it with a database of photos of pets that have been picked up or reported missing.

When a front facial photo of a pet was analyzed during the testing process, Polimeno said, the software picked the correct animal out of a database of 25,000 other pets 98 percent of the time.

“If the photo is to one side or is taken from above or below, the accuracy goes down to maybe 90 percent,” he said. “We’ve helped reunite owners with more than 15,000 missing pets since 2013.”

BARCS spokeswoman Bailey Deacon said she thinks the new technology can significantly increase the number of happy homecomings between lost dogs and cats and their frantic human companions.

“Reuniting lost pets with their owners is a really tough problem that we’ve been trying to crack for a long time,” she said. “In Maryland, pets brought into a shelter only have to be held See DOGS, page 6