EFit-V vs E-Fit

Christmas break is till this Sunday, Monday will be starting the Spring term, but I had been spending almost everyday in this week on campus, I will be either in the EFit-V and E-Fit course or in the library, trying to get everything done but getting nowhere.E-Fit course had been running since 5th of January, while EFit-V course is only 3-day course, so its only starts from last Monday. Well, the course is not for students, but I got myself into the course anyway, by asking to be general helpers for this course. This course is actually for legal enforcement, mainly for police, especially for those Facial Identification Officers, but some participants are from Universities, either teaching Forensic or Digital Forensics etc. This course is provided by VisionMetric, a spin-off company of the University.

I'm quite lucky actually, I choose to be general helpers, but they ask me to come and act as witness for EFit-V as well, got the chance to be a "witness" of a crime, and "interview" by the police officers and describe what ever face the "suspect" are. The day after the EFit-V witness day, I got a call from the organisers early in the morning, not even have my breakfast yet, to ask me to come for the E-Fit witness day due to some people chose to "fly some airplanes". I got the chance to be a "witness" to both of the software!!!

Well, enough for the story, I'll introduce this software here. Because I do not have the licence for this software, so the software interface that I got it from the lecture notes will have some part been pixelate. I just doesn't want to get into any legal problems, although they would be happy somebody advertise their products for free.

E-Fit, is a composite-based computer software that had been used for quite some time already, maybe a decade or so, it replaces the old detective kind of facial composite called PhotoFIT where the features are printed on paper and the detectives will have piece those composites together and will look like this.....

E-Fit is kind of the computer version of PhotoFIT, which has a large library in the software, while the witness will choose the best feature that resembles the suspect. This takes a hell lots of time, when I did this interview, it took the officer more than 2 hours to get information from me, process it, finalise it using photo editing tools, and have some paperwork of it. This software has it's negative part is where people that have poor memories like me will have a very difficult time remembering the face and features of the suspect in a nick of time. How often do you have a "good hard look" at somebody face when he slap you and leg for it? Honestly, I can recall the face of the "suspect" that day because the "mark", which is the person our lecturer had ask us to remeber, had been sitting there and not hitting our "victim", while 8 of us that is the witnesses stares at the "mark" from time to time. Note, the "mark/suspect" is just some random people that for no reason marked by our lecturer. Our lecturer is the Director of the company that sells this program, cool huh???

Back to topic, now, EFit-V, this is a feature-based program, where we use recognition more rather than memory, which I like the most. People tends to recognise people rather than

 remembering their faces and features. For example, how many people that reads my blog,

 remember every single detail of the face of your parents? or partner? Does your parents or

 partner have thin/thick or long/short nose? Colour of eyes? Size of lips? Shape of ears? Colour and style of the hair? Length of beard/moustache/stubble? I dare you, 1 out of 10 here can't give any details of this, but when you walk in the street, and you bump into each other, straight away you knew the person, due to recognition. Don't blame yourself yet, your brain is not a

 computer, nor any digital cameras that can store megapixels of images. By choosing what you felt the image looks like or similar to, the computer generates some random faces, with the mutation of the images becoming lesser and lesser, the witness able to select the face that

 resemble the most likeness of the suspect.

The images below are either from the internet or my lecture notes, none of them are made from real person pictures, but from EFit-V.This image is released by Kent Police on the appeal of Ashford robbery.

Due to not a real person, sometimes EFit can go something wrong.... Here is an EFit-V released by Norfolk Police. The news goes here!

This is the user interface of EFit-V, but there are a lot more functions in it.

No prize for correct guessing, assume everyone knows who this man is.

Well, we sure doesn't want anyone got caught innocently, don't we??? This is an EFit released by Thai Police in a case of bank robbery. Well, I believe that's the only lead the police have, they follow the lead anyway.

I believe that later in this year, I will be using this software in one of my assignment, might be playing around with it if I'm free.