Professor Charlie Frowd

Charlie's primary research area involves improving the quality of facial composites. These are pictures of suspects to crime, which are often seen in the newspapers and on TV crime programmes, and are used mainly by the police to identify criminals. The traditional method is for a witness or victim to describe the appearance of a suspect and then to select individual facial features – such as hair, face shape, eyes, nose, mouth – from a kit of parts. These parts are normally assembled together using computer software, or a pencil/crayon if a sketch artist is employed, to produce a composite face. The face is then published in the media to enable the offender to be identified and apprehended. Unfortunately, in spite of considerable research and development, the recognition of composites constructed by this ‘feature’ approach is poor, even following procedures which mirror real life as far as possible (e.g. Frowd, Carson, Ness, McQuiston, et al., 2005, see list of publications below).

Some progress has been made to understand why such composites are of poor quality (e.g. Frowd, Bruce, McIntyre & Hancock, 2007) and to improve composite identification (e.g. Bruce et al., 2002, on morphing; Frowd, McQuiston-Surrett et al. 2004, on interviewing; Frowd, Bruce, Ross et al., 2007, on caricature; and Frowd et al., 2007, on system). Preprints of these papers are available for download below.

Charlie has been developing a new composite system with Vicki Bruce and Peter Hancock from the University of Stirling. It is called EvoFIT and is based on a holistic face coding scheme and an evolutionary interface. Using this system, witnesses choose from a selection of faces that bear a resemblance to an assailant (a composite is 'evolved' over time by breeding together the selected faces).

In recent experiments, EvoFIT has outperformed other current composite systems (in the most recent realistic study, EvoFIT reached a level of naming roughly twenty times that of a traditional 'feature' type of composite system - details submitted for publication and are available on request (for latest published research see Frowd (2021); other papers are submitted for publication evaluating new techniques which have led to even higher performance).

The system is available for police use. Please contact Charlie for details; we provide police training, workshops and customer support. Charlie is also available to interview witnesses and victims for producing composite images. Examples of EvoFIT composites constructed can be seen on the EvoFIT web site. Please contact Charlie if you would like to use EvoFIT in a criminal investigation or for research -- note that this system has the advantage that a verbal description of the 'target' face is NOT required from the person constructing the face.