The Importance of Ground Truth: An Open-Source Biometric Repository

Abstract

Advances in forensic technologies and procedures seek to produce better and more efficient policing for safer societies. Little is understood, however, about how effectively the human forensic professional employs such technologies, or the cognitive and perceptual processes of judgment and decision making the forensic professional engages in during the course of evidence evaluation. For this, experimenters need materials that approximate the realism of crime scene evidence, while ensuring the ground truth about the source of this information. These two goals are often incompatible. We discuss the development of an open-source biometric repository to address the issue of ground truth. This repository contains a range of crime related materials such as fingerprints and palm-prints, shoe-prints, faces, handwriting, voices, and irises. Our goal is to provide a large, open-source repository of forensic information, where certainty of the source in built into the system, to help advance research on identification by humans and technology.

Capturing Fingerprint Expertise with Protocol Analysis

“…We also used latent ("crime scene") and rolled ("arrest") prints from the Forensic Informatics Biometric Repository (Tear et al, 2010). These high-quality prints with known ground truth were collected from undergraduate students.…”