Computer assisted photo-anthropometric analyses of full-face and profile facial images

Expert witnesses using facial comparison techniques are regularly required to disambiguate cases of disputed identification in CCTV images and other photographic evidence in court. This paper describes a novel software-assisted photo-anthropometric facial landmark identification system, DigitalFace tested against a database of 70 full-face and profile images of young males meeting a similar description. The system produces 37 linear and 25 angular measurements across the two viewpoints. A series of 64 analyses were conducted to examine whether separate novel probe facial images of target individuals whose face dimensions were already stored within the database would be correctly identified as the same person. Identification verification was found to be unreliable unless multiple distance and angular measurements from both profile and full-face images were included in an analysis. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.