[The vermillion border of the lips as the object of medico-criminalistics expertise]

The objective of the present work was to study biometric characteristics of the vermillion border of the lips and estimate the possibility of their use for personality identification. Photographs of the lips obtained from the archive of the Department of Forensic Medical Personality Identification, Russian Centre of Forensic Medical Expertise, were analysed with the use of the specially developed ALips 2.0 software. Verification of the hypothesis of normal sign distribution allowed the values of the signs to be split into intervals. Category limits of each sign were calculated for both men and women, the categories were compared in the automatic regime with the help of the ALips 2.0 software. The diagnostic value of the described system is thus far rather low. A number of calculation procedures allowing to identify the object of interest were performed at the concluding stage of the study. The results of experiments suggest the high identification significance of the signs under consideration while the number of the objects similar to the one being identified does not exceed five which confirms that the groups are fairly well distinguished.