Title: Forensic sketch recognition using user specific facial region

Authors: Saurabh Singh; Madhavi Sinha

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India

Abstract: Forensic sketches play an important role in criminal identification process. These sketches are drawn by forensic artists on the basis of the description provided by an eyewitness or victim. These sketches are publicised to get some clues to reveal the identity of the criminals. A faster way to identify the criminals is to match the forensic sketch with some government agency mug-shot database. In the process of drawing a sketch, the description provided by the eyewitness often includes some unique facial details comprising the deviations from an average face. For example, some spot on face, mole, scar, cuts, etc. Study says that, the information which is more uncommon is more likely to be last in the memory. In this paper, we suggest a sketch to mug-shot matching approach called difference vector-based matching (DVBM), which utilises deviations present in facial regions to measure the similarity between a sketch and a mug-shot image. The method is tested over a dataset containing 112 sketches and a large mug-shot gallery of 7,112 images. The results generated using DVBM are compared with standard face matcher and show considerable improvement in matching accuracy.

Keywords: biometrics; sketch recognition; face recognition; specific features; image analysis; pattern recognition; dimensionality reduction; facial features; forensic sketches; criminal identification; forensic artists; mugshots; similarity measurement; difference vector-based matching; matching accuracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2016.077831

International Journal of Biometrics, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.134 - 144

Received: 25 Jul 2015
Accepted: 16 Apr 2016
Published online: 16 Jul 2016 *

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