Further Automating and Refining the Construction and Recognition of Facial Composite Images

Bringing a criminal to justice is a labour intensive process. In the current paper, we explored ways of reducing the police time involved with the construction and identification of facial composites (these are images of wanted persons made by witnesses and victims of crime). A software system called EvoFIT was used that ‘evolved’ a composite by the repeated selection and breeding of complete faces. In the first part, a standalone version of EvoFIT was designed and evaluated in the laboratory. This performed similarly to the full system that normally requires several hours of a police officer’s time. It was also found that composite quality did not change overall, although was more variable in one of the measures used, if users were asked to make fast rather than slow face selection judgements. In latter work, a small database of composites was built that could be used to search for matching identities. It was found that pixel intensity (texture) information was valuable for composites produced from a traditional ‘feature’ based system, but feature shape information was valuable for composites produced from EvoFIT. The results show promise for the automated construction and identification of composite images.