# Object Detection Approaches to Identifying Hand Images with High Forensic Values

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16431/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Vision Transformers for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05598/) (2022)
- [11K Hands: Gender recognition and biometric identification using a large dataset of hand images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04322/) (2017)
- [NMS Strikes Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06137/) (2022)
- [Contextual Attention for Hand Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04882/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Forensic science plays a crucial role in legal investigations, and the use of advanced technologies, such as object detection based on machine learning methods, can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of forensic analysis. Human hands are unique and can leave distinct patterns, marks, or prints that can be utilized for forensic examinations. This paper compares various machine learning approaches to hand detection and presents the application results of employing the best-performing model to identify images of significant importance in forensic contexts. We fine-tune YOLOv8 and vision transformer-based object detection models on four hand image datasets, including the 11k hands dataset with our own bounding boxes annotated by a semi-automatic approach. Two YOLOv8 variants, i.e., YOLOv8 nano (YOLOv8n) and YOLOv8 extra-large (YOLOv8x), and two vision transformer variants, i.e., DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and Detection Transformers with Assignment (DETA), are employed for the experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the YOLOv8 models outperform DETR and DETA on all datasets. The experiments also show that YOLOv8 approaches result in superior performance compared with existing hand detection methods, which were based on YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 models. Applications of our fine-tuned YOLOv8 models for identifying hand images (or frames in a video) with high forensic values produce excellent results, significantly reducing the time required by forensic experts. This implies that our approaches can be implemented effectively for real-world applications in forensics or related fields.