title: Photo-Realistic Statistical Skull Morphotypes: New Exemplars for Ancestry and Sex Estimation in Forensic Anthropology.
abstract: Graphic exemplars of cranial sex and ancestry are essential to forensic anthropology for standardizing casework, training analysts, and communicating group trends. To date, graphic exemplars have comprised hand-drawn sketches, or photographs of individual specimens, which risks bias/subjectivity. Here, we performed quantitative analysis of photographic data to generate new photo-realistic and objective exemplars of skull form. Standardized anterior and left lateral photographs of skulls for each sex were analyzed in the computer graphics program Psychomorph for the following groups: South African Blacks, South African Whites, American Blacks, American Whites, and Japanese. The average cranial form was calculated for each photographic view, before the color information for every individual was warped to the average form and combined to produce statistical averages. These mathematically derived exemplars-and their statistical exaggerations or extremes-retain the high-resolution detail of the original photographic dataset, making them the ideal casework and training reference standards.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Human Craniofacial and Skeletal Identification (HuCS-ID Lab), School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Jodi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Caple
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Human Craniofacial and Skeletal Identification (HuCS-ID Lab), School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Carl N
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8696-3809
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Stephan
mesh_terms: D002508:Cephalometry; D005260:Female; D018732:Forensic Anthropology / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D010781:Photography; D044469:Racial Groups; D012016:Reference Values; D054881:Sex Determination by Skeleton; D012886:Skull / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D012984:Software
keywords: biological profile; craniofacial identification; craniometry; forensic science; reference standards; skeletal identification