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Software Matches Police Sketches To Mugshots
Zothecula writes "We've seen it in numerous TV shows and movies – the witness to a crime looks through a book of mug shots, then works with a police sketch artist to come up with a likeness of the nasty person they saw. After looking through hundreds of mug shots, however, it's possible that the tired-brained witness could look right at a photo of the guilty party and not recognize them. It's also possible that there is a mug shot of the criminal on a database somewhere out there, but that this particular witness will never see it. A computer system being pioneered at Michigan State University, however, could be the solution to such problems – it automatically matches faces in police sketches to mug shots."
Oh, wait... do I have a mugshot?
This is a bad thing because the potential for misidentification is high. Couple this system with the notorious unreliability of eye witnesses and the potential for unintended coercion and you have a recipe for a constitutional disaster.
It has the potential of rapidly producing results without any particular infringement on civil liberties.
I would not expect it to be perfect and should probably be followed up by a manual search.
anchorman rapist?
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2006/10/anchorman-rapist2.jpg
Whats the difference between police mugshots and facebook mugshots? I wouldn't think much..
Where have they been? I saw this on an episode of CSI about 10 years ago. It's not like it's new or anything.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Long Black Veil (J. Cash)
=====================
Ten years ago on a cold dark night,
someone was killed 'neath the town hall lights.
There were few at the scene, but they all agreed,
that the man who ran looked a lot like me.
Chorus ~ She walks these hills, in a long black veil.
She visits my grave, when the night winds wail.
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows, but me
The Judge said son, what is your alibi,
if you were somewhere else, then you won't have to die.
I spoke not a word, though it meant my life,
for i'd been in the arms of my best friends wife.
Chorus*
Now the scaffold is high, and eternity's near.
She stood in the crowd, and shed not a tear.
But some times at night, when the cold wind moans
In a long black veil, she cries over my bones
Chorus ~ She walks these hills, in a long black veil.
When the cold winds blow, and the night winds wail.
No body knows, no body sees.
No body knows, but me.
You have nothing to fear if you aren't a criminal. They're talking about mug-shots, not the readily available photo ID, license, and passport databases.
And we're talking about sketches from eye witnesses, people who perfectly saw the criminals in question, with near-perfect vision, spot-on memory, and the utterly transparent interpretations of police sketch artists. There is absolutely no way that a system never tested broadly against false positives could be used to improperly find the innocent guilty.
I mean, look at fingerprinting.
We have to trust that the government and police have our best interests in mind. If you can't turn to the frighteningly powerful to protect your civil rights, who can you turn to?
Weren't they doing this in James Bond movies like 30 years ago? (Just checked...For Your Eyes Only, 1981...) I would have thought technology wouldn't be THAT far behind James Bond. A couple years, sure, but 30?
So they'll just put all the mugshots into picasa and use the faces tool?
Pssh, Faceback is even better. It doesn't even need part of the face to get a match.
I kinda wonder what took so long.
Pretty bad match up in the article there. I wonder if they have the right guy
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I think that this may be a good thing, but with the ability to have configuration settings that allow for a near match to a loose match. What I mean by loose match is that the configuration may say allow a setting for x number of non-close matches to exist for the mugshot to appear.
Long ago, Michael Jackson did a video where he had pictures of faces where parts of the face match from one person to the next to form the transition. Could something like this be used?
Also, when mugshots are taken, I am of the belief that identifying marks on ones person should also accompany the mug shot. For instance, tattoos and birthmarks or even scars may be very helpful when trying to identify an individual of a crime. It also allows for a more accurate inclusion of mugshots if such info is added to the mugshot search.
On a side note...
It was funny, I witnessed a crime by some teenagers once, and I figured out what they were up to based on how they acted. It made me take notice of the way they looked and the way they were dressed. A few days later, based on some of my eye witness testimony they were caught and put in a line up. The officer brought a grouping of 12 photos, each group of 6 contained one of the teenagers. In one line up I identified the teen and two others, one I had dated and one I went to High School with. On the second set I just identified the teen who I remembered.
Even though I knew what the boys looked like, the photos really made me think long an hard about who I was selecting. I did not want to be wrong, and accuse the wrong person.
small #? what's the problem with them people? forgot to drink their round-up first?
I thought when they had witnesses work with a sketch artist, they just had a book with drawings of generic facial features, such as a page on noses, a page on eyes, etc. Flipping through pages of mugshots then describing the suspect to a sketch artist just screams out for identification and contamination. I thought the whole point of a sketch artist was you did the sketch first, then compared it to potential subjects/previous mugshots to see any similarities.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why not do the same thing here as they do with lineups? Have the computer pick the top 10 closest matches and display them. If the witness selects the photo of the same one the computer thought was correct then you have a likely match.
excellent point
This is great IF it does not in any way count as evidence against the identified person - this system should only serve as a way for the police to get someone to investigate that might then later be found to be guilty on other grounds. The reason for this is that eye witnesses are not reliable, so if you make them go through a million photos, they ARE going to get it wrong. The best they can do is to identify a few pictures that kind of look like the person they saw, but we humans are more likely to arbitrarily choose one picture out of the likely candidates to be the RIGHT one, instead of admitting that we can't say for sure. Making the computer eliminate most of the less likely matches only increases the unreliability of the system because eye witnesses can then in effect look through even more pictures in less time leading to an even higher false positive rate.
It's also OK to put someone the police suspects on other grounds in a lineup and have the witness pick that person out. What's bad is combining the two things by having the computer select a likely match and put that person in the lineup based solely on matching the witness description - that has all the same problems as having the witness go through the database themselves. The problem is that a computer system with millions of entries is always going to produce a person who looks a lot like the right guy, even if the actual right guy isn't in the database at all, and that is going to make many witnesses identify the wrong guy based on striking similarity.
The even bigger problem is that this problem is not obvious and many juries and even some defense lawyers aren't going to understand the problem correctly - "he says this guy attacked him, what more is there to say in this matter? Guilty!"
Why is it, when searching for a serial rapist in Washington DC, it always pulls up Bill Clinton?
Gobsmacked that this hasn't been in use for years - at least to weed out the obvious mismatches before someone starts going through them one by one...
A match is only likely if the description of the suspect and the subsequent police sketch are accurate, which they usually aren't.
Uni-bomber anyone?
NASA completes the first faster than light space flight in history
Weren't they doing this in Star Trek like 45 years ago? (Just checked...The Original Series, 1966...) I would have thought technology wouldn't be THAT far behind Star Trek. A couple years, sure, but 45?
I'm actually surprised we haven't seen something like this yet.
I think you've improved a great deal.
of the screen cap of a local news broadcaster with an artist's rendition of a wanted criminal in the background that is nearly identical to the broadcaster.