An economised craniofacial identification system

It has been attempted to develop an economised craniofacial identification system, as a special automated version of photo/video superimposition techn ique, that can deal with common cases of personal identification with the a id of a skull and a nearly front view face photograph of the suspected vict im. The proposed method is economic in respect of (i) cost of hardware configur ation, (ii) processing time as well as (iii) manual labour involved. Over a nd above, it has got a capability to take care of ambiguities due to soft t issue thickness during the selection of facial features, which is a past of the procedure. In order to reconstruct a 2-D cranial image, superimposable over the facial one, the new method does not need any reconstruction of a digitised 3-D cr anial image. It works simply by a suitable segment-wise processing of a 2-D cranial image with the aid of the symmetry perceiving adaptive neuronet (S PAN), that has recently been introduced in connection with nearly front vie w facial image recognition. The final comparison of the facial and the supe rimposable cranial images is as versatile as the same for facial image reco gnition by SPAN. A practical application of this extended version;of SPAN has been demonstra ted in the present paper. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.