Psicologia do Testemunho: dos Primórdios à Atualidade

This paper has the objective to show the scientific contribution of Psychology of Testimony, understanding the phenomenon of false memories, affecting the veracity of the testimonies and the identification of suspect. Thus, the hypothesis to be considered is if the Psychology of Testimony is helpful bringing scientific criteria for the testimony and suspect identification, reducing judicial errors and the condemnation of innocents. The methodology used is based on a bibliographic review. For this purpose, the origin of Psychology of Testimony is described, pointing its main milestones and how the science has been developed with the various experiments and discoveries. It is important to verify how human memory works and what can be expected from it, considering the scope of testimonies being realized at police station and at judicial hearing. The false memories effect is considered as well. Afterward, it is analyzed how the Code of Criminal Procedure considers the testimonies of the victims and witness, besides the suspect identification. It also pursued to demonstrate possible existing distinction between the Code’s rules and the reality, reflecting on potential judicial errors. Finally, based on the Psychology of Testimony and dignity of the human person, there are suggestions related to be the best way to make the victims and witnesses´ testimony, in addition to suspect identification.

A Forensic Study of Ethnicity and Sex Differences in Fingerprint Patterns in a Malaysian Subpopulation

Fingerprint is one of the most common evidence found at a crime scene. Owing to the uniqueness of fingerprint, it is useful for suspect identification. Typically, the questioned fingerprint is of limited contribution due to blurriness of the minutia or absence of potential suspect. However, it is still useful if the ethnicity or sex of the questioned fingerprint could be inferred to narrow down the scope of searching of suspect. Therefore, this study aims to examine sexual and ethnic differences in fingerprint patterns among the three major ethnic groups in Malaysia, i.e. Malays, Chinese and Indians. In total, 2000 plain fingerprints were collected from all the ten fingers of 200 Malaysians (i.e. 99 males and 101 females). Each of the three ethnic groups was represented by at least 60 subjects. Descriptive statistics and hypothesis test were performed to assess the sexual and ethnic variability of fingerprint patterns. In addition, simple correspondence analysis was also conducted to support the descriptive and inferential statistics. By considering fingerprint patterns in all the ten fingers, loop was the most frequent pattern in Malays (23.0%) and Indians (23.2%), while Chinese (13.9%) showed slightly higher frequency of whorl than Malays (9.6%) and Indians (10.3%). The relative distribution of fingerprint patterns of male was similar to that of female. In conclusion, fingerprint patterns could be used to infer the ethnicity rather than the sex of a suspect in the Malaysian context.

Eyewitnesses’ Visual Recollection in Suspect Identification by using Facial Appearance Model

Facial recognition has been an active field of imaging science. With the recent progresses in computer vision development, it is extensively applied in various areas, especially in law enforcement and security. Human face is a viable biometric that could be effectively used in both identification and verification. Thus far, regardless of a facial model and relevant metrics employed, its main shortcoming is that it requires a facial image, against which comparison is made. Therefore, closed circuit televisions and a facial database are always needed in an operational system. For the last few decades, unfortunately, we have experienced an emergence of asymmetric warfare, where acts of terrorism are often committed in secluded area with no camera installed and possibly by persons whose photos have never been kept in any official database prior to the event. During subsequent investigations, the authorities thus had to rely on traumatized and frustrated witnesses, whose testimonial accounts regarding suspect’s appearance are dubious and often misleading. To address this issue, this paper presents an application of a statistical appearance model of human face in assisting suspect identification based on witness’s visual recollection. An online prototype system was implemented to demonstrate its core functionalities. Both visual and numerical assessments reported herein evidentially indicated potential benefits of the system for the intended purpose.

Low-Resolution Face Recognition with Single Sample per Person via Domain Adaptation

Numerous low-resolution (LR) face images are captured by a growing number of surveillance cameras nowadays. In some particular applications, such as suspect identification, it is required to recognize an LR face image captured by the surveillance camera using only one high-resolution (HR) profile face image on the ID card. This leads to LR face recognition with single sample per person (SSPP), which is more challenging than conventional LR face recognition or SSPP face recognition. To address this tough problem, we propose a Boosted Coupled Marginal Fisher Analysis (CMFA) approach, which unites domain adaptation and coupled mappings. An auxiliary database containing multiple HR and LR samples is introduced to explore more discriminative information, and locality preserving domain adaption (LPDA) is designed to realize good domain adaptation between SSPP training set (target domain) and auxiliary database (source domain). We perform LPDA on HR and LR images in both domains, then in the domain adaptation space we apply CMFA to learn the discriminative coupled mappings for classification. The learned coupled mappings embed knowledge from the auxiliary dataset, thus their discriminative ability is superior. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on FERET, LFW and SCface database, the promising results demonstrate its effectiveness on LR face recognition with SSPP.