On forensic use of biometrics

Forensic science largely concerns the analysis of crime. The science of biometrics has developed approaches that are used to automatically identify individuals by personal characteristics. Biometric techniques have primarily been used to assure identity. The main steps of a biometric recognition approach include: acquisition of the biometric data, localization and alignment of the data, feature extraction, and matching. This chapter concentrates on two case studies discussing the forensic possibilities of face and ear as biometrics. It introduces the manual and computer-aided forensic face recognition. The chapter discusses the disparities between the behaviour of the current automatic face recognition systems and that which is needed for forensic application, and outlines the current progress towards addressing the challenges existing in face recognition. An emerging biometric ear is examined. There is a rich variety of approaches for ear biometrics and these are steeped in pattern recognition and computer vision.