The increasing number of mass disasters, and the untraceable (and shameful) number of unidentified people worldwide, combined with new challenges due to mass migrations, pose human identification as a great challenge in the preservation and defense of human rights in today’s society. There is an urgent need to provide forensic practitioners with accurate, robust, unbiased and automate identification systems. The field of AI has the potential to develop those tools. However, there is an absence of industrial initiatives exploiting these emerging technologies that have so far curbed its application to practical identification scenarios.
The global forensic technologies market is expected to reach €88.9Bn by 2026 (9,6% CAGR2017-2026), thanks to increased government funding and rapid technological advancement of forensic technologies. The Skeleton-ID project is located in this dynamic and competitive environment, with the advantage that the solutions provided by Skeleton-ID and Panacea are the first of its kind and face no direct competition. Indirect competitors are DNA forensic solutions and AFIS (fingerprints comparison) providers. While these techniques are highly accurate, they are very time-consuming (several days/weeks in the case of DNA analysis) or expensive (in the order of millions of euros, in the case of AFIS). Also, they have a limited range of applicability (i.e. need DNA databases or soft tissue preservation). Therefore, the solutions provided by this Marie Curie project represent a cheaper and faster alternative, applicable when other techniques are not (e.g. decomposed bodies, lack of trustable records).
Personal identity is associated with the preservation and defense of Human Rights (HR) and is a tool to repair the violation of these rights. The Universal Declaration of HR was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10th 1948. Since then, a great number of actions towards the investigation of crimes against humanity have been carried out all over the world, in both, conflict and post-conflict environments. One essential step in this direction is the identification of missing persons. In this sense, the European Union has a strategic framework on HR. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (adopted in 2000 and binding on EU countries since 2009) complements national HR documents and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Its purpose is to protect fundamental rights within the EU and to promote them worldwide under the values of Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for HR. Nevertheless, as the authors of the 2017 Fundamental Rights Report in Europe indicate in the 10th anniversary of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “profound gaps in the implementation of fundamental rights persist on the ground and - in some areas - are deepening”.
