Forensics is mainly concerned with proving and investigating infringements, identifying perpetrators and describing modus operandi. Biometrics, on the other hand, is a relatively new science that aims at measuring and analysing a person's unique characteristics, both behavioural and physical. The potential of applying biometrics to forensics comes natural as several forensic questions rely on identifying, or verifying the identity, of people allegedly involved in crimes. Although these two scientific communities have operated in relative isolation over the past couple of decades, forensic biometrics have been successfully applied through the development automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS), and most recently, through the development of face recognition systems. The potential of forensics biometrics, however, can be extended to other biometric traits, such as iris and gait analysis.
This project aims at continuing supporting the development of the forensic biometric community. In the past five years, several improvements in the biometric community have resulted in more robust technologies for face, fingerprint, iris and gait recognition, which can now be applied to practical scenarios.
This project aims at consolidating the integration of multimedia forensics into forensic science. Multimedia forensics is concerned with the development of scientific methods to extract, analyse and categorise digital evidence derived from multimedia sources.. Since the enabling technologies in multimedia forensics are similar to those used for identification and verification purposes in biometric forensics, the integration of these areas is seamless. The proposed project will support the integration of knowledge and expertise from the forensics, biometrics and multimedia forensics communities.
Multimedia forensic and biometric techniques are useful in combating crime. For example multimedia forensic techniques can be used for source device identification, source device verification common source inference, content authentication and source-oriented image clustering. On the other hand, biometric techniques for identifying and recognising people find their use in for example, access control border control. From the scientific point of view, both sets of techniques are enabled by computer vision, image processing and machine learning. Therefore, experience gained from one domain is transferrable to the other and can facilitate cross-fertilisation of ideas.
The main objective of IDENTITY is to enhance international and European collaborations in research, entrepreneurial development and innovation within the area of multimedia and biometric forensics. To this end, IDENTITY has the following specific objectives:
1. To promote knowledge transfer among research institutions and companies about methodologies for identification within a forensic context. Two main lines of identification are considered, imaging device identification for multimedia forensics, and people identification, for biometric forensics.
2. To enhance research programs by incorporating experience of private companies and police investigators from real identification scenarios and forensic cases.
3. To disseminate knowledge and technologies internationally to ensure a wide impact and a continuing fostering of the multimedia forensics and biometric forensics communities.
