Campomanes-Alvarez, C, Ibáñez, O, Cordón, O and Wilkinson, C (2017) Hierarchical information fusion for decision making in craniofacial superimposition. Information Fusion, 39. pp. 25-40. ISSN 1566-2535

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Abstract

Craniofacial superimposition is one of the most important skeleton-based identification methods. The process studies the possible correspondence between a found skull and a candidate (missing person) through the superimposition of the former over a variable number of images of the face of the latter. Within craniofacial superimposition we identified three different stages, namely: (1) image acquisition-processing and landmark location; (2) skull-face overlay; and (3) decision making. While we have already proposed and validated an automatic skull-face overlay technique in previous works, the final identification stage, decision making, is still performed manually by the expert. This consists of the determination of the degree of support for the assertion that the skull and the ante-mortem image belong to the same person. This decision is made through the analysis of several criteria assessing the skull-face anatomical correspondence based on the resulting skull-face overlay. In this contribution, we present a hierarchical framework for information fusion to support the anthropologist expert in the decision making stage. The main goal is the automation of this stage based on the use of several skull-face anatomical criteria combined at different levels by means of fuzzy aggregation functions. We have implemented two different experiments for our framework. The first aims to obtain the most suitable aggregation functions for the system and the second validates the proposed framework as an identification system. We tested the framework with a dataset of 33 positive and 411 negative identification instances. The present proposal is the first automatic craniofacial superimposition decision support system evaluated in an objective and statistically meaningful way. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0801 Artificial Intelligence And Image Processing
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software Q Science > QM Human anatomy R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA1001 Forensic Medicine. Medical jurisprudence. Legal medicine
Divisions:	Art & Design
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date Deposited:	03 May 2017 10:14
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2022 15:00
DOI or ID number:	10.1016/j.inffus.2017.03.004
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/6343

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