Evolving the face of a criminal: How to search a face space more effectively.

Frowd, Charlie D.; Bruce, Vicki; Gannon, Carol; Robinson, Mark; Tredoux, Colin; Park, Jo; Mcintyre, Alex; Hancock, Peter J.B.

Abstract

Witnesses and victims of serious crime are often required to construct a facial composite, a visual likeness of a suspect's face. The traditional method is for them to select individual facial features to build a face, but often these images are of poor quality. We have developed a new method whereby witnesses repeatedly select instances from an array of complete faces and a composite is evolved over time by searching a face model built using PCA. While past research suggests that the new approach is superior, performance is far from ideal. In the current research, face models are built which match a witness's description of a target. It is found that such 'tailored' models promote better quality composites, presumably due to a more effective search, and also that smaller models may be even better. The work has implications for researchers who are using statistical modelling techniques for recognising faces.

• Conference Name: 2007 ECSIS Symposium on Bio-inspired, Learning, and Intelligent Systems for Security (BLISS 2007)
• Start Date: Aug 9, 2007
• End Date: Aug 10, 2007
• Publication Date: 2007-08
• Deposit Date: Feb 2, 2017
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Book Title: ECSIS Symposium on Bio-inspired, Learning, and Intelligent Systems for Security, 2007. BLISS 2007
• ISBN: 0769529194
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/bliss.2007.28
• Keywords: Facial Recognition, criminal,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/680517