Sketchy Composite Sketches

In a case featured this month on “America’s Most Wanted,” composite facial sketches are being used to identify a suspect accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in Wheeling, West Virginia and attempting to abduct an 18-year-old woman in Martins Ferry, Ohio. The FBI and other crime investigators currently use either sketch artists or computer software to create a composite facial sketch. Traditionally, the software allows witnesses to select individual features and then software combines these features into one image. Rather than using the traditional methods or software, researchers have developed software that they claim is more effective—allowing witnesses to select an image based on the entire face. The researchers that developed the new software say that the traditional method is inherently inaccurate. People remember faces in their entirety rather than by individual features, the researchers say. The new software has only been used in one criminal case to date, but laboratory research has shown it to be about three times more effective than the traditional method. There seems to be a significant amount of controversy over the new method. Many police officers suggest that composite sketches prepared by traditional methods are highly effective at identifying suspects. Additionally, many believe that the flexibility of a qualified sketch artist allows for more accurate rendering of the face than any computer software could produce. The composite sketch produced by an artist in the Wheeling sexual assault case has produced more than 600 tips, but the suspect still has not been caught.

Most of this information is available in the following Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article:
http://www.pittsburghpostgazette.com/pg/07084/772371-84.stm

This study from The British Journal of Psychology referenced in the article suggests that witnesses can more accurately identify the external features, such as face shape and hair, of a face than the internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth).
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpsoc/bjp/2007/00000098/00000001/art00005?token=005c1baf390b26f9604332b25757d5c4f6d4e227a677e442f20675d3b763c44443a796c7b40442059ae771ff8ba3

Here’s the America’s Most Wanted case profile:
http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=43490