Discriminating Power of FISWG Characteristic Descriptors Under Different Forensic Use Cases

FISWG characteristic descriptors are facial features that can be used for evidence evaluation during forensic case work. In this paper we investigate the discriminating power of a biometric system that uses these characteristic descriptors as features under different forensic use cases. We show that in every forensic use case we can find characteristic descriptors that exhibit moderate to low discriminating power. In all but one use cases, a commercial face recognition system outperforms the characteristic descriptors. However, in low resolution surveillance camera images, some (combination of) characteristic descriptors yield better results than commercial systems.