Study on the identification limits of craniofacial superimposition

Craniofacial Superimposition involves the superimposition of an image of a skull with a number of ante-mortem face images of an individual and the analysis of their morphological correspondence. Despite being used for one century, it is not yet a mature and fully accepted technique due to the absence of solid scientific approaches, significant reliability studies, and international standards. In this paper we present a comprehensive experimentation on the limitations of Craniofacial Superimposition as a forensic identification technique. The study involves different experiments over more than 1 Million comparisons performed by a landmark-based automatic 3D/2D superimposition method. The total sample analyzed consists of 320 subjects and 29 craniofacial landmarks.