Abstract
Positive identification of unknown skeletonized victims lacking clinical records generally difficult. However, if their facial photographs could be obtained, their unknown skulls could be identified by the cranio-facial superimposition. The last two decades, video superimposition technique has widely been used for identifying unknown skulls. Although video superimposition will be the most superior technique, the means are expensive and unusual installation. Therefore, in Japanese local forensic science laboratories, the video superimposition installation is not popularly used. To solve the problem the authors attempted to identify an unknown skull by an inexpensive means of superimposition using a personal computer, a digital camera, an image-scanner and a photo-retouch-soft(Adobe Photoshop). The use of the personal computer with Adobe Photoshop allowed to capture a digitized image of the facial photograph with the image-scanner and an image of the skull with the digital camera. With the Adobe Photoshop, the digitized skull's images can be converted to a transparency so as to be overlaid on the digitized facial image and then be adjusted to their respective size. In order to investigate the reliability of our cranio-facial superimposition method, one skull was superimposed on facial photographs of the true person and 14 other people. The true person was correctly identified as the skull's owner and the 14 others were excluded. Hence, the authors insist that this method will be useful to demonstrate the consistency between skull and facial photograph for personal identification.
The application of this superimposition method to three actual cases was also described.
