Defence Science and Technology Group, Edinburgh, South Australia, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.
PLoS One. 2019 Nov 19;14(11):e0225298. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225298. eCollection 2019.
Determining the identity of children is critical to aid in the fight against child exploitation, as well as for passport control and visa issuance purposes. Facial image comparison is one method that may be used to determine identity. Due to the substantial amount of facial growth that occurs in childhood, it is critical to understand facial image comparison performance across both chronological age (the age of the child), and age variation (the age difference between images). In this study we examined the performance of 120 facial comparison practitioners from a government agency on a dataset of 23,760 image pairs selected from the agency's own database of controlled, operational images. Each chronological age in childhood (0-17 years) and age variations ranging from 0-10 years were examined. Practitioner performance was found to vary considerably across childhood, and depended on whether the pairs were mated (same child) or non-mated (different child). Overall, practitioners were more accurate and confident with image pairs containing older children, and also more accurate and confident with smaller age variations. Chronological age impacted on accuracy with mated pairs, but age variation did not. In contrast, both age and age variation impacted on accuracy with non-mated pairs. These differences in performance show that changes in the face throughout childhood have a significant impact on practitioner performance. We propose that improvements in accuracy may be achievable with a better understanding of which facial features are most appropriate to compare across childhood, and adjusting training and development programs accordingly.
确定儿童的身份对于打击儿童剥削、护照管制和签证发放至关重要。面部图像比对是一种可能用于确定身份的方法。由于儿童在成长过程中面部会发生大量变化，因此了解跨年龄（儿童年龄）和年龄变化（图像之间的年龄差异）的面部图像比对性能非常重要。在这项研究中，我们检查了来自政府机构的 120 名面部比较从业者在从该机构自己的受控操作图像数据库中选择的 23760 对图像数据集上的表现。检查了童年时期的每个年龄（0-17 岁）和年龄变化范围（0-10 年）。研究发现，从业者的表现随儿童时期的变化而有很大的差异，并且取决于图像对是匹配的（同一儿童）还是不匹配的（不同儿童）。总体而言，从业者在包含年龄较大的儿童的图像对中表现更准确、更自信，并且在年龄变化较小的情况下表现更准确、更自信。匹配的图像对的年龄会影响准确性，但年龄变化不会。相比之下，不匹配的图像对的年龄和年龄变化都会影响准确性。这些性能差异表明，儿童期面部的变化对面部比较从业者的表现有重大影响。我们提出，通过更好地了解在整个儿童期最适合比较的面部特征，并相应地调整培训和发展计划，准确性可能会有所提高。
