Program Uses Interactive Genetic Algorithm to Help Witnesses Remember Criminals(sciencedaily.com)
sciencedaily.com
Program Uses Interactive Genetic Algorithm to Help Witnesses Remember Criminals
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005161328.htm
5 comments
If I were a clever defence lawyer I'd argue it would invalidate any later line-ups. This sounds like a stellar way to destroy a memory of a face.
Each time you show a person a face, you're adding new memory trace that will conflict with the real one. This will reduce the confidence in a later recognition task. You're also re-activating the real trace, allowing it to be disrupted. This would increase the false-positive rate in a line-up.
Each time you show a person a face, you're adding new memory trace that will conflict with the real one. This will reduce the confidence in a later recognition task. You're also re-activating the real trace, allowing it to be disrupted. This would increase the false-positive rate in a line-up.
All good points and a subject to an experiment.
A possible (somewhat sci-fi) future extension to this idea would be directly monitoring the brain of the subject, in conjunction with eye movements, in an attempt to quickly detect a subconscious signal of 'recognition' while scanning the computer-generated faces. Might be that certain signals in the brainwave (e.g. the P300 or something similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29 ) could be used for this purpose.
I bet that a web application built from this would be enormously popular.
It would also be useful as a way to create and share an online avatar likeness.
It would also be useful as a way to create and share an online avatar likeness.
If the faces are more fleshed out but not accurate, then that's just as bad as having a generic likeness.
There's an academic paper on the work (George et al., EFIT-V: Interactive Evolutionary Strategy for the Construction of Photo-Realistic Facial Composites, Genetic And Evolutionary Computation Conference 2009, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389384), but it only mentions using the software as a trial with police departments. There's too many variables there to give me confidence in the results.