Artistic enhancement in the production of photo-fit likenesses: An examination of its effectiveness in leading to suspect identification

Gibling, Felicity; Bennett, Peter

doi:10.1080/10683169408411939

Cited by 17 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These procedures included: the use of experimenters who were experienced in assisting witnesses construct a composite (referred to here as composite operators for computerized systems); a cognitive interview, to assist recall of the target face; open‐ended construction sessions, to promote good performance; and software painting tools, whose use may improve the appearance of a face (e.g. Christie, Davies, Shepherd, & Ellis, 1981; Davies, Milne, & Shepherd, 1983; Frowd, Carson, Ness, Richardson, et al , 2005; Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon, & Holland, 1986; Gibling & Bennett, 1994). Composites took about an hour to construct using the E‐FIT, PRO‐fit and FACES systems, and about 2 hours for Sketch and EvoFIT.…”

Section: Introduction To Experiments 1 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relative importance of external and internal features of facial composites

Frowd

Bruce

McIntyre

et al. 2007

British J of Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Three experiments are reported that compare the quality of external with internal regions within a set of facial composites using two matching-type tasks. Composites are constructed with the aim of triggering recognition from people familiar with the targets, and past research suggests internal face features dominate representations of familiar faces in memory. However the experiments reported here show that the internal regions of composites are very poorly matched against the faces they purport to represent, while external feature regions alone were matched almost as well as complete composites. In Experiments 1 and 2 the composites used were constructed by participant-witnesses who were unfamiliar with the targets and therefore were predicted to demonstrate a bias towards the external parts of a face. In Experiment 3 we compared witnesses who were familiar or unfamiliar with the target items, but for both groups the external features were much better reproduced in the composites, suggesting it is the process of composite construction itself which is responsible for the poverty of the internal features. Practical implications of these results are discussed.

show abstract

Section: Introduction To Experiments 1 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relative importance of external and internal features of facial composites

Frowd

Bruce

McIntyre

et al. 2007

British J of Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research has shown that the person controlling the software, the composite operator, can affect the quality of a composite (Christie et al, 1981, Gibling and Bennett 1994. As this was a variable we were keen to limit, a single operator was used for each experiment but given appropriate training to permit consistent effects across experiments.…”

Section: Composite Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel approaches to composite production: interfaces that behave contrary to expectation

et al. 2007

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines two facial composite systems that present multiple faces during construction to more closely resemble natural face processing. We evaluated a 'parallel' version of PRO-fit, which presents facial features in sets of six or twelve, and EvoFIT, a system in development, that contains a holistic face model and an evolutionary interface. The PRO-fit parallel interface turned out not to be quite as good as the 'serial' version as it appeared to interfere with holistic face processing. Composites from EvoFIT were named almost three times better than PRO-fit, but a benefit emerged under feature encoding, suggesting that recall has a greater role for EvoFIT than previously thought. In general, an advantage was found for feature encoding, replicating a previous finding in this area, and also for a novel 'holistic' interview. (131 words) Keywords: facial composite; parallel presentation; memory; holistic; witness 2 Witnesses and victims of serious crime may construct a visual likeness of a suspect's face. This is known as a facial composite and is typically obtained by describing the appearance of a suspect and selecting facial features: hair, face shape, eyes, nose, etc. Facial composites were originally the domain of artists, professionals who sketched with pencils or crayons, but other approaches were developed for those less artistic. Examples include Identikit and Photofit, available about 40 years ago. Research has identified problems with them, including both a limitation in the range of features (Davies 1983) and feature selection carried out in isolation from a whole face, a suboptimal procedure: features are normally seen in the context of a whole face (Davies and Christie 1982, Tanaka andSengco 1997). These issues appear resolved with the modern systems and very good likenesses are now possible (Cutler et al., 1988, Koehn and Fisher 1997, Davies et al., 2000.E-FIT and PRO-fit are computerised versions of Photofit used by police forces throughout the world. They have been found to produce composites that are named about 18% of the time from laboratory witnesses working from a recent memory of a target face (Brace et al., 2000, Bruce et al., 2002, Davies et al., 2000, Frowd et al., 2004, 2005a, a finding which suggests that most composites go unnamed. The situation is more worrying, however, when a more realistic delay to construction is used. Research by Frowd et al. (2005b) found that less than 1% of composites from E-FIT and PRO-fit were correctly named with a 2 day delay. We note a similar finding for the Mac-A-Mug Pro, a sketch-based computerised system (Koehn and Fisher 1997).Why might naming be so low for composites constructed after 2 days? Frowd et al. (2005b) proposed that this could be the result of a witness's memory becoming more of an impression after such a delay, with weakened access to facial features. Their work compared several systems including E-FIT, PRO-fit and a sketch artist. While performance was low after 2 days, composites from the sketch artist were better. T...

show abstract

“…Given the importance of being able to artistically enhance a composite (e.g. Gibling and Bennett 1994), the current study employed Adobe Photoshop for use with FACES. As the first three of these differences favour the PRO-fit system, it was predicted that FACES composites would be of worse quality than those produced by PRO-fit.…”

Section: Experiments 1 -Pro-fit Versus Facesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An evaluation of US systems for facial composite production

et al. 2007

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Witness and victims of serious crime are normally requested to construct a facial composite of a suspect's face. While modern systems for constructing composites have been evaluated extensively in the UK, this is not the case in the US. In the current work, two popular computerized systems in the US, FACES and Identikit 2000, were evaluated against a 'reference' system, PRO-fit, where performance is established. In Experiment 1, witnesses constructed a composite with both PRO-fit and FACES using a realistic procedure. The resulting composites were very poorly named, but the PRO-fit emerged best in 'cued' naming and two supplementary measures: composite sorting and likeness ratings. In Experiment 2, PRO-fit was compared with Identikit 2000, a sketch-like feature system. Spontaneous naming was again very poor, but both cued naming and sorting suggested that the systems were similar. The results support previous findings that modern systems do not produce identifiable composites.

show abstract

Artistic enhancement in the production of photo-fit likenesses: An examination of its effectiveness in leading to suspect identification

Cited by 17 publications

References 4 publications

The relative importance of external and internal features of facial composites

The relative importance of external and internal features of facial composites

Parallel approaches to composite production: interfaces that behave contrary to expectation

An evaluation of US systems for facial composite production

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About