A Question of Evidence: Biometrics and forensics

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Abstract

The roots of biometrics lie in the need for the identification of criminals, so there is a natural relationship between biometrics and forensics. Despite this there is a dearth of material describing use of biometrics as evidence, though there are many indicators that suggest how biometrics might aid modern court procedures. We shall consider the nature of admissible evidence, and how biometrics have been used to provide it. We shall consider gait biometrics in particular for it has been developed for forensic purposes, whilst also describing its current state of art. We shall also consider how face and ear might be used, together with the notion of soft biometrics for identification. There appears to be a rich opportunity to deploy biometrics in forensics since in biometrics we tend to learn from large volumes of data and we are also accustomed to analysing the confidence we have in our results. In this way we shall consider biometrics and forensics as a voyage from the origins of development to analysis in handcrafted and deep learning systems, aiming to lead to evidence that is admissible in international judicial systems.

Biography

Mark S. Nixon is currently a Professor of Computer Vision with the University of Southampton, U.K. His research interests are in image processing and computer vision. His team were early workers in face recognition and later pioneers of gait recognition. He has chaired/program chaired many conferences (BMVC 98, AVBPA ’03, FG ’06, ICPR ’04, ICB ’09/15, and BTAS ’10). He is a member of IAPR TC4 Biometrics, the IEEE Biometrics Council and Fellow of IET, IAPR, and BMVA. His textbook on Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision is currently in its Third Edition, published by Academic Press/ Elsevier in 2012. His first book, Introductory Digital Design - a programmable approach , was published by MacMillan, July 1995 and there's a new version Digital Electronics: a Primer, published by Imperial College Press 2015. With Tieniu Tan and Rama Chellappa, he wrote Human ID based on Gait which is part of the Springer Series on Biometrics, and was published late 2005. He recently co-edited the first book on Biometrics Spoofing Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing, with Springer 2014 and its second Edition 2018; We wrote the survey on Gait Biometrics in the first text on Biometrics: Personal ID in Networked Society, and the Ear Biometrics Chapter in The Handbook of Biometrics. He’s written a heck of a lot of papers and supervised a heck of a lot of (great) PhD students.

Mark Nixon
University of Southampton, UK