Charlie Frowd

• University of Central Lancashire

Chapter comparing and contrasting issues related to human and machine face recognition, including theoretical and historical accounts as well as ethical concerns with widespread adoption of face recognition technology.

When children go missing and remain missing for long periods of time, authorities sometimes retain forensic artists to age progress the last known picture to provide an estimate of the current appearance. In the present research, undergraduate artists with no training in forensic art were asked to age progress images of children to an adult appeara...

Law enforcement agencies often rely on practical technologies to help witnesses and victims of crimes construct likenesses of faces from memory. These ‘face composites’ are typically circulated to law enforcement officers and made accessible to the public in the hope that someone familiar with the depicted person will recognise their likeness and t...

During long-term missing children cases, forensic artists construct age-progressions to estimate the child’s current appearance. It is commonly believed that incorporating information about the child’s biological relatives is critical in accurately estimating the child’s current appearance. However, some evidence suggests that predicting appearance...

Facial identification based on a comparison with a photo-ID is the most standard way to prove identity at security controls. Two experiments are performed controlling for the presence or absence of within-contour facial periphery (masking) and its substitution for an average periphery image (averaging), measuring matching accuracy, reaction time an...

Recognition following long delays is superior for highly attractive and highly unattractive faces (cf. medium-attractive faces). In the current work, we investigated participants’ ability to recreate from memory faces of low-, medium- and high physical attractiveness. In Experiment 1, participants constructed composites of familiar (celebrity) face...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police of...

Rationale. The effect of alcohol intoxication on witness memory and performance has been the subject of research for some time, however, whether intoxication affects facial composite construction has not been investigated. Objectives. Intoxication was predicted to adversely affect facial composite construction. Methods. Thirty-two participants we...

In recent years there has been growing interest in the identification of people with superior face recognition skills, for both theoretical and applied investigations. These individuals have mostly been identified via their performance on a single attempt at a tightly controlled test of face memory—the long form of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (C...

Cell-phone conversation is ubiquitous within public spaces. The current study investigates whether ignored cell-phone conversation impairs eyewitness memory for a perpetrator. Participants viewed a video of a staged crime in the presence of 1 side of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful halfalogue), 2 sides of a comprehensible cell-...

When children go missing for many years, police and missing persons agencies will commission the creation of age-progressed images designed to approximate the child’s current appearance. Traditionally, forensic artists have created such images by hand. Increasingly, computerized techniques are being implemented. This chapter outlines some of the ma...

When children go missing for many years, investigators commission age-progressed images from forensic artists to depict an updated appearance. These images have anecdotal success, and systematic research has found they lead to accurate recognition rates comparable to outdated photos. The present study examines the reliability of age progressions of...

Lab-based research has found that people vary widely in their ability to recognise faces. However, few studies have examined how these individual differences relate to performance in more ecologically valid face recognition tasks. Eyewitnesses to a crime are sometimes asked to generate an image of the suspect using specialised software systems – th...

Purpose The article assesses the impact of seven variables that emerge from forensic research on facial-composite construction and naming using contemporary police systems: EvoFIT, Feature and Sketch. Design/methodology/approach The paper involves regression- and meta-analyses on composite-naming data from 23 studies that have followed procedures...

Facial composite systems help eyewitnesses to show the appearance of criminals. However, likenesses created by unfamiliar witnesses will not be completely accurate, and people familiar with the target can find them difficult to identify. Faces are processed holistically; we explore whether this impairs identification of inaccurate composite images...

It is well established that we carry stereotypes that impact on human perception and behaviour (e.g. G.W. Allport, "The nature of prejudice". Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954). Here, we investigate the possibility that we hold a stereotype for a face indicating that its owner may have a mental illness. A three-stage face-perception experiment sugg...

Facial composites have played a significant role in policing for about four decades. They are primarily used as an investigative tool, to enable a person familiar with the offender (e.g. a police officer or member of the public) to put a name to the face. Until recently, composites had very low correct naming rates (5%), suggesting that few offende...

Purpose: To investigate the potential susceptibility of eyewitness memory to the presence of extraneous background speech that comprises a description consistent with, or at odds with, a target face. Design/methodology/approach: A between-participants design was deployed whereby participants viewed an unfamiliar target face either in the presence...

This paper presents an effective method of statistical shape representation for automatic face analysis and identification in 3-D. The method combines statistical shape modelling techniques and the non-rigid deformation matching scheme. This work is distinguished by three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new 3-D shape registrat...

Introduction Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting quietly outside a café sipping your favourite hot beverage when someone rushes past and snatches your mobile phone, which you left on the table, as you often do. You were able to get a good look at the person’s face, albeit for a short time. Your next hour is spent speaking with a police offic...