Similarity, analogy, compatibility, identification: personal identification in forensic practice

Personal identification is a forensic procedure of recognizing a subject, whether corpse or living, based on a set of parameters and evidence. Spreading of video surveillance cameras has changed forensic application in identification. Indeed, there has been a shift from the evaluation of universally recognized anthropometric parameters to the spasmodic search for individual traits and/or characteristics that could be safely attributed to a single subject.

Authors analyzed two different cases of personal identification with the analysis and processing of images extracted from video surveillance systems. The first case involved two individuals suspected of throwing an ordnance into the relevant space of a public building. The second case involved a subject suspected of committing a robbery against a commercial establishment.

In the field of personal identification focused on images processing extracted from video surveillance systems, as in the cases presented by the authors, there are lot of critical issues and limitations, which could undermine data. Correct personal identification can be achieved by comparing the clearly visible and objectively recognizable somatophysical and physiognomic characteristics of the offender with those of the suspects. So how compatible are two subjects compared? Compatibility and identification are two very different con-cepts. It is not necessarily the case that full compatibility is equivalent to personal identification. It is not necessarily the case that the absence of morphological similarity is equivalent to identification exclusion.