Forensic Face Matching: Research and Practice

In everyday life we identify faces regularly and seemingly with great ease. One might assume this to be a straightforward and highly accurate task. However, we are poor at identifying the faces of unfamiliar people, who we have never met before, despite the fact that many important everyday tasks depend on this.

Forensic face matching requires the comparison of two face photographs, of a person who is not known to the observer. This seemingly simple task is critical for a wide range of security tasks, such as person identification
at airports and borders, passport issuance and renewal, and criminal identification in police investigations. Despite its ubiquity, face matching is highly prone to error, even under conditions that are designed to maximally facilitate this task. For this reason, face matching has been studied extensively in psychology, with the bulk of the research conducted since 2010.

Forensic Face Matching provides readers with a wide-ranging, detailed, and critical overview of facial comparison and face matching, providing insights into its application, efficacy, and limitations in occupational settings, and of current scientific knowledge of this task.

Markus Bindemann, Cognitive Psychologist, University of Kent, England

Markus Bindemann is a Cognitive Psychologist at the University of Kent in England. He was educated at the Universities of Stirling (BSc, 1997-2001) and Glasgow (PhD, 2001-2004) in Scotland and has been researching face perception for nearly twenty years, with particular emphasis on person identification over the past decade. He holds numerous scientific publications in this field and has edited several special journal issues on this topic. He is the editor as well as a contributing author to this book, which he conceived to bring together the latest knowledge of key experts in the rapidly expanding field of unfamiliar face matching.