Composite Sketch Software

Composite Sketch Software Company IQ Biometrix. IQ Biometrix, Inc., developers of FACES composite sketch software, provides law enforcement and security technology solutions for government and private industry. IQB's face sketching software. The sketch artist software includes a detailed manual as well as exercises to help you improve your composite image ability. You also get a booklet of thumbnail images from the FACES database to assist in witness interviews. How can FACES technology help in coordinated law enforcement efforts? SketchCop® Facial Composite System software is the perfect portable, 24/7 solution for solving crime. Our built-in, SketchCop® Editor allows users to edit their images. Those who wish to make more. All the best Composite Sketch Maker 21+ collected on this page. Feel free to explore, study and enjoy paintings with PaintingValley.com.

Whether done by sketch artist or computer, how accurate is it really?

Law enforcement has used facial compositing to help solve crimes since Billy the Kid was a fugitive in the American Wild West.

Conventionally, sketch artists created hand-drawn renderings with charcoal or pencil. But today the use of sketch artists is becoming increasingly rare in criminal investigations, often reserved for only the largest departments. The sketch artists of old are quickly being replaced by facial composite software.

While the work of artists is being taken over by computerized tools, the functions of forensic composite imagery have expanded. It is used for identification of persons or objects, image modification, depictions of crime scenes, and reconstruction and post mortem identifications, says James Lucas, adjunct faculty at Oakton Community College of Illinois.

But some experts are questioning the accuracy of these tools — and of composites or photofits in general.

In an article appearing in the February issue of 'Current Directions in Psychological Science,' Gary Wells, professor of psychology at Iowa State University whose studies of eyewitness memory are widely known and cited, and co-author Lisa Hasels, also from Iowa State University, point to several studies that indicate facial composite systems produce a poor likeness of the intended face. According to the article, researchers had inferior results in studies where individuals attempted to create composites of famous celebrities. In one study, just 2.8 percent of participants correctly named the likeness of a well-known celebrity created with face composite software.

Researchers like Wells are concerned because of the potentially negative consequences of a bad composite. Broadly distributed to law enforcement, newspapers and the public, an inexact image may lead an investigation astray and produce wrongful convictions. A sketch of the Unabomber in a hood and sunglasses created a virtually useless rendition of Ted Kaczynski, and he eluded law enforcement for many years. On the other hand, strong links tied Timothy McVeigh to the Oklahoma City bombing, among them the fact that his appearance matched eyewitness accounts used by FBI artist Raymond Rozycki to develop a composite drawing.

'There is a presumption — if we have a tool use it. But [what we're saying is] wait a minute, be careful here,' Wells cautions.

Free Composite Sketch Software

Flaws in thefacial composite process
Dr. Harry Wechsler, a noted expert on biometrics and face recognition, who serves as professor of computer science and director of the Center for Distributed and Intelligent Computation at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, points to articles by G. Daniel Lassiter published in 'Current Directions in Psychological Science' (2002) and Dr. Charlie Frowd, a researcher at University of Central Lancashire, whose primary research involves improving the quality of facial composites, in 'Psychology Crime and Law' (2005).

Frowd's article titled 'Contemporary composite techniques: The impact of a forensically relevant target delay' outlines the lackluster performance of composite naming using a two-day delay between the time a witness saw the perpetrator and when he or she worked with the forensic artist. His study concludes that composite naming, that is, identifying a subject by matching a composite against a database, though a photo lineup or a police bulletin, 'was surprisingly low,' says Wechsler. In fact, composite naming was successful in only 3- to 8-percent of the studied cases.

Yet facial composite software may not be to blame, Wechsler says. Numerous factors affect the accuracy of eyewitness composites: A delay following the event, exposure time to the subject, target distinctiveness, emotion, stress, all play an important role in the composite produced.

Whether manual or computerized, composites depend on verbal descriptions that are not always accurate. A basic problem, Wechsler says, is that photofits mostly consist of shape and very little texture. These contours are embellished with scant skin texture, and lack other details that make a person recognizable.

In addition, researchers find issue with the method in which eyewitness composites are assembled — by individual features.

Psychological research has shown that people store faces in memory in a holistic way, says Wells, whose research on eyewitness identification is funded by the National Science Foundation. 'They don't store individual features but an overall holistic image of the face. And if faces are stored holistically, the best retrieval is holistic,' he says. '[Witnesses] don't really have good retrieval access to individual features. Any task to retrieve individual features is going to be profoundly difficult.'

Knowledge of holistic processing may be a boon to future face composite systems that will utilize 'whole-face' methods for face recall, according to a February 11, 2007, article in 'Science Daily,' for which Wells was consulted. Such systems begin by generating a random set of faces. The witness then selects the face most similar to their memory of the perpetrator. This will be the 'parent' face that yields a set of similar looking faces, which are the result of several mutations to the parent face. The witness again makes a choice and the process continues until it's impossible to discriminate between the options from his or her memory of the perpetrator.

EvoFIT software, with British firm ABM as its industrial partner, is one facial composite system based on a holistic face coding scheme and an evolutionary interface. Using this system, witnesses choose from a selection of faces that bear a resemblance to an assailant (a composite is evolved over time by breeding together the selected faces). In recent experiments by Frowd, EvoFIT has outperformed other current composite systems (in the most recent realistic study, EvoFIT reached a level of naming roughly twice that of another United Kingdom composite system).

Frowd, who has conducted extensive research in the area of facial composites, along with principal investigator Dr. P. Hancock, is currently working on a U.K. government grant at the University of Stirling, Scotland. The aim of the project, called Evolving a Better Composite, reports www.psychologoy.stir.ac.uk/staff/cfrowd/index.php, is to develop and exploit the holistic (whole face) nature of EvoFIT. There is good evidence that composites produced by EvoFIT are better than other U.K. systems, but research is now required to optimize performance, notes Frowd. Currently, the system generates faces with random characteristics, for a given sex and race, and the user selects those that most resemble the target.

Researchers wish to make the system more user-friendly by identifying psychologically useful variables, such as age and obesity, and implementing these within the model. This would allow a witness to request that a face be made older, for example, something which requires considerable artistic skill with current facial composite systems, explains Frowd.

A second aspect of the project is to explore better ways to help witnesses remember relevant details. Current police interviewing techniques concentrate on facial features (e.g. describing the nose), which may work well for today's feature-based composite systems, but gets in the way of remembering what the face as a whole looked like. The researchers' aim is to develop interviewing methods that better match the holistic nature of EvoFIT, and to predict that a combination of these approaches should also enable witnesses with a limited recall (of an assailant) to construct useful composites.

Computerized vs. manual composites
Frowd et al. also conducted a study titled 'An evaluation of U.S. systems for facial composite production' that evaluated the reliability of two systems:

San Mateo, California-based Wherify Wireless Inc.'s Faces 3.0, and
Scottsdale, Arizona-based Identi-Kit Solutions' Identi-Kit 2000.

The study, which is to be published later in 2007 in 'Ergonomics' is posted on www.uclan.ac.uk/psychology/research/people/Frowd.html.

In this study, Frowd states researchers found U.K. software programs produce composites that are correctly named about 20 percent of the time when participant-witnesses attempt construction either immediately or a few hours after seeing a target face. Unfortunately, he says, when participant-witnesses are required to wait two days before they can construct the composite — a situation typical of real police witnesses — composite naming fell to a few percent correct at best, according to statistics gathered in research for journal articles 'The Process of Facial Composite Production' in 'Forensic Psychology and Law' and 'Parallel Approaches to Composite Production' in 'Ergonomics.'

A comparison of three U.K. programs, a sketch artist and Faces 3.0 (a program not differing so much from later version 4.0 that results are invalid) were the subject of another Frowd study. It found that composites done by a sketch artist were correctly named 8 percent of the time, but the other systems were worse — naming was less than 4 percent.

A 2005 study by Frowd et al. comparing computerized systems with manual systems found that all other composite systems tested were inferior to a sketch artist. While it may be that the skill of the person was responsible for this, he says the mode of representation might be as well. It turns out that sketch artists working with witnesses tend to produce composites with less shading compared with systems, such as ABM's PRO-fit and FACES, which utilize photographed features, especially in areas around the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin. It might be that these features, Frowd notes, are better left blank rather than including potentially misleading shading information. As such, sketched composites may contain less incorrect information and may be more identifiable.

More research needed
More research is definitely called for. Anecdotal evidence touting the successes of composite sketches can be dangerous. 'It's in the nature of anecdotes to be selective and to ignore all cases where it didn't work,' says Wells. 'Our approach has been to drop the anecdotes — we like to study in controlled conditions … we know which face [witnesses] saw and how well they do in generating the face. Software has improved incredibly but there's still a problem in getting likenesses. The [issue] doesn't seem to be within the software itself.'

Wells calls Frowd's research 'promising,' and continues to hope for more controlled studies and police software programs that stand up to scientific criteria. 'If we can't make them better,' he says, 'we should use them less or as a last resort.'

On the other hand, taken with other evidence, composites can assist investigators. 'Photofits factor out many biometric features,' says Wechsler, 'narrowing down the police work to identify suspects and thus making [their job] easier and more efficient.' Efficiency increases because investigators narrow the subset of suspects, and accuracy improves because they can spend more time on a reduced set of suspects.

Perhaps Lee Farrow, FACES global account manager at Wherify Wireless Inc., says it best: If we compare finding a suspect through use of facial composites to finding a needle in a haystack, 'facial composites may make the haystack a little smaller or the needle a little shinier.'

She continues it's critical to remember that a facial composite gives investigators 'a direction but it's not the nail in a coffin — there's additional evidence like DNA or fingerprints.' It narrows down the suspect, but 'it's not the finalized tool to arrest someone.'

Donna Rogers is a freelance writer based in Huntington, New York. She can be reached at drogerskranich@verizon.net.

When it comes to criminal composite sketches, they can be eerily accurate or just plain bad. Composite sketches are often released to the public when there are no photos or footage of the criminals on hand. These sketches are drawn up based off witness testimony and often times they aren’t the greatest masterpieces. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best and worst composite sketches we could find.

He murdered his family, including his wife, mother and three children. John List managed to escaped justice for 18 years. A clay bust was created to give the public an age-enhanced likeness of John List with hopes that someone would recognize the killer after all these years. He was arrested after his neighbor saw the clay bust on America’s Most Wanted.

Canadian serial killer and rapist, Paul Bernardo, looks an awful lot like the composite sketch drawn up based off the description given by one of his victims. Even one of Bernardo’s coworkers called the police to report that he knew who belonged to haunting sketch.

Bank robber, Joseph Weir (or maybe Joseph Weird would be more appropriate) has one of the most unflattering composite sketches we have ever seen. The eyes look in separate directions while the teeth look like the keys on a busted piano. Still, he was caught and sentenced to over 30 years in prison.

No composite sketch can truly capture the evil in Richard Allen Davis’ eyes. Polly Klaas’ killer was eventually caught and sentenced to death for her murder, although he is still alive in a California prison. The composite sketch looks fairly accurate considering the circumstances.

This nondescript composite sketch that was released in July 2016 didn’t look like it would bring a killer to justice, but it turns out, the suspected murderer looked an awful lot like the composite sketch. Jon David Guerrero was arrested for the murder of three homeless men in San Diego, CA. He has yet to go to trial for the crimes.

Glenn Edwin Rundles was arrested for armed robbery and he could’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for this amazing, DaVinci-like sketch. Let’s be honest, the composite sketch released by police in Texas looks like it was drawn by a 7 year old. We also can’t help but notice that it’s missing both eyebrows and lips.

In Sweden, Niklas Lindgren joked with coworkers that he looked like the composite sketch of a serial rapist police were looking for. Several tips came in after the release of the sketch, which eventually led to Lindgren’s arrest.

Convicted rapist and serial killer, Rodney Alcala was brought down because of this composite sketch. The friends of one of the victims were able to give police an accurate description of Alcala. His parole officer recognized him, which led to his eventual arrest. He was finally tried and convicted and sentenced to death.

It’s been difficult to track down which police department is responsible for this sketch. As a result, we are unable to determine if this Sesame Street character is still walking the streets or not. If you’ve seen this person and would like to perform a citizen’s arrest, please do so. Also, please make sure you film it and send us a copy.

The unibrow could probably use some work, but this composite sketch of serial killer Ted Bundy is pretty good. His coworkers and a professor at his college recognized the sketch as Bundy, but police weren’t so sure. It was hard to believe that a law student with no record could be responsible. As a result, Bundy kept on killing. He was eventually arrested, convicted and put to death.

Believe it or not, these are the same person. This seems like a bad composite drawing, but it kind of isn’t. Joanna Hayes donned a wig and mustache before entering a Target parking lot and gunning down her daughter-in-law. She was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.