Forensic Face Matching: Research and Practice

In everyday life we identify faces regularly and seemingly with great ease. One might assume this to be a straightforward and highly accurate task. However, we are poor at identifying the faces of unfamiliar people, who we have never met before, despite the fact that many important everyday tasks depend on this.

Forensic face matching requires the comparison of two face photographs, of a person who is not known to the observer. This seemingly simple task is critical for a wide range of security tasks, such as person identification at airports and borders, passport issuance and renewal, and criminal identification in police investigations. Despite its ubiquity, face matching is highly prone to error, even under conditions that are designed to maximally facilitate this task. For this reason, face matching has been studied extensively in psychology, with the bulk of the research conducted since 2010.

Forensic Face Matching provides readers with a wide-ranging, detailed, and critical overview of facial comparison and face matching, providing insights into its application, efficacy, and limitations in occupational settings, and of current scientific knowledge of this task.