Personal Identification in Medico Legal and Criminological Practice With the Aid of Mathematical Methods and Computers

• NCJ Number: 72157
• Journal: Sudebno-Meditsinskaya Ekspertiza Volume: 20 Issue: 4 Dated: (1977) Pages: 5-9
• Author(s): S A Gasparyan; B A Fedosutkin; Y Y Voloshin; V T Oleynikov
• Date Published: 1977
• Length: 5 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Country: Russia (Former Soviet Union)

Annotation

This Soviet paper presents an objective method of isolation, fixation, and evaluation of facial characteristics on photographs of the head and skull of unidentified corpses, and of missing persons, using mathematical methods and computers in order to establish identity.

Abstract

Current methods of medicocriminological identification use correspondingly scaled and foreshortened photographs of a missing person and of the skull and head of an unidentified corpse. These methods lack objective criteria for evaluation of the results in that the reproduction of the skull could match the photographs of several persons. Also when it is decided that the corpse and the missing person are not the same, the characteristics of the studied skull cannot be used for further investigation because of the lack of a reliable system of quantitative registration of anatomical and anthropological features of a skull. However, based on these methods, an automatic information-search system has been designed with an identification block for primary selection of photographic material. Two hypotheses are tested: either the skull of the unidentified corpse belongs to the person on the photograph or it does not. Using front view photographs of the face and of the skull, clearly marked anatomic-topographic points are fixed on both images in order to test whether the two can be matched. Qualitative indicators of the distances between these points (e.g., the width of the mouth) are established and grouped vertically and horizontally. With the aid of computers, the characteristics most constant through variations of foreshortening are chosen and for comparison and an estimated margin of error applied to determine the choice of one hypothesis over the other. To establish and evaluate the main principle of choice between the hypotheses, experiments have been conducted using 141 face and skull photographs. With the addition of such characteristics as sex and age, the possibility of error in the identification is diminished considerably. Footnotes, mathematical formula, the graph, and an illustration are included.