ICB 2019

Abstract

Forensic biometrics is defined as the application of human-based and computer-assisted biometric recognition methods and technologies to analyse biometric traces and reference specimens. Forensic biometrics has primarily been developed to address requests of the criminal justice about the source level inference. Questions about the source of biometric traces are relevant in several forensic scenarios: identity verification, closed and open-set identification, intelligence, investigation and evaluation of evidence in court:

• Forensic biometrics is used for the verification of identity or identification of suspected persons, or for the (closed-set or open-set) identification of victims in the context of disaster victim identification (DVI), for example using DNA material, fingerprints or dental records.
• Forensic intelligence consists in linking criminal cases together, for example using DNA traces or fingermarks.
• Forensic investigation consists of selecting shortlists of candidates as potential sources of biometric traces, for example using face images.
• Forensic evaluation focuses on the description of the strength of the evidence that an individual is the source of a trace, for example using body height measurements (feature-based approach) or speech recordings (score-based approach).

But the use of forensic biometrics can also be extended to the examination of traces captured in less traditional conditions, such as conflict zones, and to answer other relevant questions, beyond the question of the source. These questions focus on the examination of the authenticity and integrity of the trace material and on the characterisation of people and their activities, generally on big amounts of data:

• The characterisation of people includes questions for example about their number, their age, their gender, their health condition (healthy, deprived, injured, living, dead).
• The characterisation of their activities includes questions about what they do, how, where and when.

This new type of requests opens new challenges for the research and development in forensic biometrics, in terms of relevant datasets, biometric technology and forensic inference.

Biography

Didier Meuwly is born in Fribourg, Switzerland. After a classical education (Latin / Philosophy), he graduated as a criminalist and criminologist (1993) and received his PhD (2000), both at the School of Forensic Science (Ecole de Sciences Criminelles) of the University of Lausanne. He currently shares his time between The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), an agency of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he is the principal scientist, and the University of Twente, where he holds the chair of Forensic Biometrics. He specialises in the automation and validation of the probabilistic evaluation of forensic evidence, and more specifically from biometric traces. He was previously responsible for the fingerprint section within the NFI and the leader of a project about the probabilistic evaluation of fingerprint evidence. From 2002 to 2004 Didier worked as a senior forensic scientist at the R&D department of the Forensic Science Service (UK-FSS), then an executive agency of the British Ministry of the Interior. Didier serves as an associate editor for Forensic Science International (FSI) and is a member of the R&D standing committee of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI-RDSC). He is also the lead editor of an ISO standard in the field of forensic science (21043-3).