Perception, Image Processing and Fingerprint-Matching Expertise

T Ghose1, G Erlikhman2, P Garrigan3, P Kellman2, J Mnookin4, I Dror5, D Charlton6

1Perceptual Psychology, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
2Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States
3Department of Psychology, St. Joseph's University, United States
4School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States
5School of Psychology, University College London (UCL), United Kingdom
6Sussex Police, Sussex Police, United Kingdom
Contact: tandraghose@gmail.com

Fingerprint evidence plays an important role in forensic science. Little is known about the perceptual aspects of expert fingerprint analysis, or the differences between performances of fingerprint experts and novices. We examined fingerprint identification performance among experts, novices, and novices with a short training intervention. Expert performance far exceeded both groups of novices. We predict the performance accuracy by using quantitative image measures borrowed from computer vision. We found that novices primarily used basic variables known to affect visual perception such as brightness and clarity of, mostly, the tenprints while the experts used domain-specific, configural features such as core and delta of the latents, ratio of areas and relative image characteristics of the latent-tenprint pair. Ultimately, it may be possible to evaluate a fingerprint comparison in terms of the quality of visual information available in order to predict likely error rates in fingerprint pair comparisons. Such a metric would have great value in both adding confidence to judgments when print comparisons are uncomplicated in terms of having high quality visual information, and it would allow appropriate caution in cases that are, from an objective standpoint of the quality of visual information, more problematic.

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