An advanced scatter search design for skull-face overlay in craniofacial superimposition

Craniofacial superimposition is a forensic identification technique where photographs or video shots of a missing person are compared with a skull found in order to determine whether that is the same person. The second stage of this complex forensic process, named skull-face overlay, aims to achieve the best overlay of the skull 3D model and the 2D image of the face. In this paper, we aim to propose a new skull-face overlay method based on the scatter search evolutionary algorithm. This new design exploits problem-specific information in order to achieve faster and more robust solutions. The performance of our proposal is compared to the current best performing approach in the field of automatic skull-face overlay. Results on six real-world identification cases previously solved by the Physical anthropology lab at the University of Granada (Spain) are considered in our experimental study. The proposed method has shown a very accurate and robust performance when solving the latter six face-skull overlay problem instances.