Two different approaches to handle landmark location uncertainty in skull-face overlay: coevolution vs fuzzy landmarks

Craniofacial superimposition is a forensic process where photographs or video shots of a missing person are compared with the skull that is found. By projecting both photographs on top of each other (or, even better, matching a scanned three-dimensional skull model against the face photo/video shot), the forensic anthropologist can try to establish whether that is the same person. The whole process is influenced by inherent uncertainty mainly because two objects of different nature (a skull and a face) are involved. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, a cooperative coevolutionary algorithm, to deal with the use of imprecise cephalometric landmarks in the skull-face overlay process. Following this approach we are able to look for both the best transformation parameters and the best landmark locations at the same time. Coevolutionary skull-face overlay results are compared with our previous fuzzy-evolutionary automatic method over six skull-face overlay problem instances corresponding to three real-world cases solved by the Physical Anthropology lab at the University of Granada (Spain). Promising results have been achieved though the robustness of the method should be improved.