Understanding the Performance of Forensic Facial Identification Experts

In this project, we are testing the ability of professional forensic facial examiners in face identification tasks and comparing their accuracy to untrained human participants and computer algorithms. This work follows a previous study by our lab (White et al., 2015) and is aimed at designing a general purpose test that can be used by forensic examiners to determine the skill level of these experts on different types of challenging cases. The primary goal of our present work is to select image pairs that are highly challenging for facial forensic examiners. This is being done by “benchmarking” test stimuli (images and videos of faces) with untrained participants and carrying out a detailed analysis of performance on the face image items used in our previous studies (e.g., White et al., 2015).

This work is funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Phillips, P. J., Yates, A. N., Hu, Y., Hahn, C. A., Noyes, E. Jackson, K. Cavazos, J. G., Jeckeln, G., Ranjan, R., Sankaranarayarnan, S., Chen, J.C., Castillo, C., Chellappa, R. White, D., & O’Toole, A. J. (2018). Face Recognition Accuracy of Forensic Examiners, Super-recognizers, and Algorithms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

White, D., Phillips, P. J., Hahn, C. A., Hill, M., & O’Toole, A. J. (2015). Perceptual expertise in forensic facial image comparison. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 282, 1814-1822. – http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1292.

White, D., Norell, K. Phillips, P. J. & O’Toole. (in press). Human factors in facial forensic examination. In (Eds. M. Tistarelli & C. Champod) Biometrics in Forensic Science. Springer Verlag.

Norell, K, Läthén, K. B., Bergström, P., Rice, A., Natu, V. & O’Toole, A. J. (2014) The effect of image quality and forensic expertise in facial image comparisons. Journal of Forensic Psychology. doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.12660.

Links to our other projects

Perception and Memory for Human Faces
Face Recognition Comparisons Between Humans and Machines
Functional Neuroimaging of High Level Visual Processing of Human Faces
Perceptual Relationships Between Body Shape and Language
Analyzing Face Recognition Algorithms
Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Person Recognition