Facial Index Based 2D Facial Composite Process for Forensic Investigation in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The “facial composite” is one of the major fields in the forensic science that helps the criminal investigators to carry out their investigation process. The survey conducted by United States Law Enforcement Agencies confirms that 80% of the law enforcement agencies use computer automated composite systems whereas Sri Lanka is still far behind in the process of facial composite with lot of inefficiencies in the current manual process. Hence this research introduces a novel approach for the manual facial composite process, while eliminating the inefficiencies of the manual procedure in Sri Lanka. In order to overcome this situation, this study introduces an automated image processing based software solution with 2D facial feature templates targeting the Sri Lankan population. Thus, this was the first ever approach that creates the 2D facial feature templates by incorporating both medically defined indexes and relevant aesthetic aspects. Hence, this research study is comprised of two separate analyses on anthropometric indices and facial feature shapes which were carried out targeting the local population. Subsequently, several evaluation techniques were utilized to evaluate this methodology where we obtained an overall success rate as 70.19%. The ultimate goal of this research study is to provide a system to the law enforcement agencies in order to carry out an efficient and effective facial composite process which can lead to increase the success rate of suspect identification.