SKELETON-ID · Soft Computing and Computer Vision for Comparative Radiography in Forensic Identification
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-04-01 → 2020-05-05
- EU contribution
- €170,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Soft Computing and Computer Vision for Comparative Radiography in Forensic Identification
Forensic human identification is a great challenge in the preservation and defense of Human Rights. There is an urgent need to provide forensic practitioners with accurate, robust, unbiased and automatic identification systems. The MSCA IF Skeleton-ID fills part of this technological gap by automating the comparison of radiographs (CR) through a novel artificial intelligence paradigm for human identification. CR traditionally involves the use of antemortem (AM) radiographs of the suspected deceased, producing postmortem (PM) radiographs that simulate the AM ones in scope and projection, and then performing a comparison looking for consistencies and inconsistencies in bone morphology, pathological and trauma conditions, etc. CR requires a prior record of clinical images that are not always available; but if present, this technique is extremely accurate, reaching >99% reliability for certain bones. Despite its proven validity for identification purposes, automatic and objective approaches are in their infancy in this field. Most existing proposals rely on the expert's skills and experience and follow an error-prone, time-consuming and subjective approach requiring PM X-ray acquisition in the same conditions of the AM one, and the manual delineation of the bone in AM and PM radiographies. Skeleton-ID contributes to present the first complete automatic CR identification system, shifting from current observational methods to objective, fast, robust and reproducible ones. This system includes three stages: i) image segmentation: automatic delineation of the target bone's contour in the AM radiography; ii) image registration: automatic comparison of the PM 3D model of the bone and the delineated AM radiography; and iii) computer-aided decision support system able to integrate all available information and to assist the forensic expert in the decision making process. More information regarding Skeleton-ID is available in the website of the project: https://www.ugr.es/~pmesejo/skeletonid.html
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
There is an urgent need of providing forensic practitioners with accurate, robust, unbiased and automate identification systems. This fact makes more sense in the field of forensic anthropology due to the poor technological development, the increasing number of mass disasters, and the unapproachable and shameful number of unidentified people in the EU. SKELETON-ID is intended to fill this technological gap by proposing a novel computer-aided automatic paradigm, which will be implemented and validated through the development of clavicle and frontal sinus identification systems.The challenging proposal is feasible thanks to the ER (Dr. Mesejo) and supervisor (Dr. Cordón) profiles, the facilities and excellence of the hosting institution (ranked 250th overall and 45th in Engineering in the Shangai Ranking 2016), and the strong background of the involved partners. The ER obtained his PhD within a Marie Curie ITN and he has developed his research career in four different Universities in EU, one Hospital (Spain), and two research centers (INRIA, CNRS). He has become an expert in computer vision and machine learning, with practical experience in biomedical imaging. In turn, Dr. Cordón got the Spanish National Computer Science Award (2014) and some other international awards, is included in the 1% of most cited researchers in the World, and leads a multidisciplinary group participating in four European research projects.The multi-disciplinary know-how of the well-known team experts in different fields (from forensic radiology and disaster victim identification to image registration and fuzzy systems), and the equipment and facilities of the beneficiary (UGR-SOCCER), forensic partner (UGR-PAL), and supporting institution (FASE) compose a unique environment to accomplish these ambitious and breakthrough objectives. Finally, the project clearly pursues the technological transfer, which will be carried on in collaboration with the young SME PANACEA.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD DE GRANADA · GranadaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union