Suspect identification by facial features.
Often during criminal investigations, witnesses must examine photographs of known offenders, colloquially called 'mug shots'. As witnesses view increasing numbers of mug shots that are presented in an arbitrary order, they become more likely to identify the wrong suspect. An alternative is a subjective feature-based mug shot retrieval system in which witnesses first complete a questionnaire about the appearance of the suspect, and then examine photographs in order of decreasing resemblance to their description. In the first experiment, this approach is found to be more efficient and more accurate than searching an album. The next three experiments show that it makes little difference if the witness has seen the suspect in person or only seen a photograph. In the last two experiments, it is shown that the feature-based retrieval system is effective even when the witness has seen the suspect in realistic natural settings. The results show that the main conclusions drawn from previous studies, where witnesses searched for faces seen only in photographs, also apply when witnesses are searching for a face that they saw live in naturalistic settings. Additionally, it is shown that is it better to have two raters than one create the database, but that more than two raters yield rapidly diminishing returns for the extra cost.
Lee
Eric
E
Management Science, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3. elee@stmarys.ca
Whalen
Thomas
T
Sakalauskas
John
J
Baigent
Glen
G
Bisesar
Chandra
C
McCarthy
Andrew
A
Reid
Glenda
G
Wotton
Cynthia
C
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003416:Criminal Law / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D010781:Photography; D011594:Psychometrics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014796:Visual Perception