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Can facial proportions taken from images be of use for ageing in cases of suspected child pornography? A pilot study

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Abstract

The age of the victim plays a crucial role for the legal implications concerning pornography. Judges therefore often call on forensic experts to verify the age of individuals depicted on photographs or videos. However, there is no scientifically established protocol available for forensic practice in such cases. The conventional methods such as the evaluation of secondary sexual characteristics provide unsatisfactory results particularly when the legally relevant ages for child pornography (i.e. 14 and 18 years) are concerned. To overcome these limits, a European research group has explored the applicability of facial proportions as an age indicator on images. In this pilot study, standardized facial images of 353 females and 20 males from four age groups (6, 10, 14 and 18 years) were randomly selected for the metric analysis from a large data set including German, Italian and Lithuanian subjects. In this sample, several indices extracted from the frontal and lateral photographs were closely correlated to their respective indices taken from the living individuals. Furthermore, age-related changes were identified for indices taken from the photographs. The discriminant analysis showed that for the pooled sample, 60.3% of the cases were correctly classified into the respective age group. The percentage of correctly classified cases increased in the respective country samples as follows: 69.9% for Germany, 69.4% for Lithuania and 80.5% for Italy. The present study suggests that the metric assessment of the face may be used for age estimation on images. Nonetheless, more work needs to be done in order to verify the reliability of these findings on a large sample.

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Acknowledgments

This study was conducted with financial support from the European Commission (grant numbers JAI/2002/STOP/132, JLS/2005/AGIS/054 and JLS/2007/ISEC/451).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense(LABANOF), Sezione di Medicina Legale, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Mangiagalli 37, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Cristina Cattaneo, Laura Marasciuolo, Pasquale Poppa & Daniele Gibelli

  2. Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Universitätsklinikum Düsseldorf, Moorenstraße 5, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Zuzana Obertová, Melanie Ratnayake, Peter Gabriel & S. Ritz-Timme

  3. Department of Anatomy, Histology and Anthropology, University of Vilnius, Universiteto Str. 3, 01513, Vilnius, Lithuania

    J. Tutkuviene

Authors
  1. Cristina Cattaneo
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  2. Zuzana Obertová
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  3. Melanie Ratnayake
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  4. Laura Marasciuolo
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  5. J. Tutkuviene
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  6. Pasquale Poppa
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  7. Daniele Gibelli
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  8. Peter Gabriel
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  9. S. Ritz-Timme
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Correspondence to Cristina Cattaneo.

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Cattaneo, C., Obertová, Z., Ratnayake, M. et al. Can facial proportions taken from images be of use for ageing in cases of suspected child pornography? A pilot study. Int J Legal Med 126, 139–144 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-011-0564-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-011-0564-7

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