HALF-DAY MEETING ON FACIAL IMAGING AND RECONSTRUCTION IN CHILDREN


Joint meeting of  Royal Statistical Society General Applications
Section and RSS Statistical Image Analysis and Processing Study Group

        Thursday 14 June 2pm-5pm (Tea 3.30pm)
        Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX

(Nearest underground stations: Old Street, Moorgate and Barbican)

All welcome. Attendance free


MARTIN EVISON (Forensic Pathology, University of Sheffield)
Problems in computerised 3-D forensic facial reconstruction

The traditional methods of forensic facial reconstruction date back to
the Victorian Era.  Tissue depth data was collected from cadavers at a
small number of landmark sites on the face. Samples were tiny, commonly
numbering less than ten. Although these data sets have been
superceded recently by tissue depths collected from the living using
ultrasound, the same twenty-or-so landmarks are used and samples are
still small and under-representative of the general population.
A number of aspects of identity--such as age, height, geographic
ancestry and
even sex--can only be estimated from the skull. This paper will describe

research in  progress directed at the recovery of volume tissue depth
data from magnetic resonance imaging scans of the head of living
individuals;
and the development of simple interpolation simulation models of
obesity, ageing and geographic ancestry in facial reconstruction.


ADRIAN BOWMAN & MITCHUM BOCK (Department of Statistics, University of
Glasgow)
Three-dimensional assessment of facial growth in children

Stereo-photography can now be used to capture the surface shape and
texture of
three-dimensional objects. Some of the issues raised by a
collaborative project on normal and cleft-lip children, involving Oral
Surgery,
Computing Science and Statistics at the University of Glasgow, will be
discussed.


ROBERT AYKROYD (Department of Statistics, University of Leeds)
A face in the crowd: Shape distributions for face recognition

Recognition of people is an important tool used in security and forensic
applications.
One approach is to summarise the facial characteristics in
a photograph and search a database for a match. This talk will consider
distance-based
 methods for landmarks, and will present a projective shape approach
using
the wrapped Cauchy distribution. Key issues include viewpoint invariance
and
changes in facial appearance of children due to growth.


CAROLINE WILKINSON (Medical Artist, University of Manchester)
The accuracy of the facial reconstruction technique in the forensic
identification of children

This presentation discusses previous accuracy assessments of the facial
reconstruction technique and then examines the recent forensic
study of five juvenile female skulls. Assessment of the accuracy of the
technique was carried out using three methods:
a) face pool identification.
b) resemblance rating assessment.
c) morphologiocal assessment.

This meeting will be followed by the AGM of the General Applications
section.