Author

Popov V.L.

Title of article

Characteristics of conducting portrait expertise of low quality videos

Section

Criminalistic provision of law enforcement activities

Issue, year

4 (34) 2015

Abstract

Widespread video recording devices and Internet development require an adequate response of law enforcement practice. A topical task is conducting portrait examination of video images of poor quality. According to statistics, 80 % of videos are useless for the investigation because it’s impossible to identify a criminal with their help. The reasons for this are not only technical factors, but also the low readiness of forensic units to conduct portrait expertise of video images of poor quality. The traditional technique of portrait expertise, developed in the last century, is primarily focused on still images with clear face parts detection, and to a lesser extent on videos, which are inferior in quality, but gain due to the dynamics of captured movements. Most scientists focuses on the identification of dynamic characteristics (step, gestures, etc.) because the low quality video and high angle shooting do not allow to capture the face parts, but they convey the physical activity of a person pretty good. This is a complex, often unsolvable problem, because criminals rarely enter into the picture completely and for a long period of time. If it’s impossible to analyze the dynamic characteristics, the expert has to investigate the anatomic characteristics, poorly viewed in the video. In this case, face profiling can help, which doesn’t disturb the general procedure of portrait expertise. The video contains the movement of the human head left and right, up and down, so it’s possible to obtain a dimensional image of anatomic elements of human face by frame-by-frame breakdown of the image.

Keywords

portrait expertise, video, dynamic characteristics, anatomic characteristics.

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