How will Face Masks effect Facial Comparisons?

With the current climate the Covid-19 restrictions mean that everyone is required to wear a face mask of sorts, so what does that mean for facial comparison of suspects?

Facial Comparison; Facial Mapping and even Facial Recognition technology all rely on the the individual/suspects face from being identified either in full or in part. When these restrictions all came about we asked ourselves how would this all effect the recognition of individuals committing crime or being recorded by security cameras. Well it is pretty obvious that it will reduce the amount of available detail that we Imagery Analyst's can use to conduct any form of comparison; be it morphological or proportional.

But for years haven't suspects been wearing some form of face covering? Well of course, that is, in most cases the 'norm', less surgical mask more traditional balaclava's or face scarf and alike, we have always had to deal with face coverings of some sort.

But will we expect to see more cases coming through the system 2021/2022 with suspects (being compliant with the rules of the day) wearing face mask/coverings or will we continue to see brash suspects (flouting the rules) and exposing their facial features to the recording cameras. Only time will tell and given the current backlog of Court cases, it might be some time before we see this type of case come up.

Of course there is the question as to the 'initial identification' procedure by the Police; how many cases will be processed based on the limited exposed facial features alone?

We shall watch this space.

#spectresolutions #facemasks #forensicimageryanalysis #facialcomparison