Dr Charlie Frowd
Consultant/Visiting Researcher, Facial Composites, witness and EvoFIT, PsychologyUniversity of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland, UK + 44 (0) 1786 466375
cfrowd@uclan.ac.uk
I am based at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. My work involves improving the quality of facial composites.
Links
Vicki Bruce, Peter Hancock and Alex McIntyre are part of the facial composite team.
ABM is our industrial partner for EvoFIT (contact person, Leslie Bowie). They also produce PRO-fit, one of the two facial composite systems used in the UK (the other is E-FIT).
EvoFIT facial composite system.
Operation Mallard (Northants).
Research Materials
My primary research involves improving the quality of facial composites and facial composite systems (facial composites are pictures of suspects to crime, as seen on TV crime programs, etc.) I have been developing a new composite system - for my Ph.D. and thereafter - with Vicki Bruce and Peter Hancock from here and Leslie Bowie from ABM. It is called 'EvoFIT' and is based on a holistic face coding scheme and an evolutionary interface (EvoFIT facial composite system). Using this system, witness choose from a selection of faces that bear a resemblance to an assailant (a composite is 'evolved' over time by breading together the selected faces). In recent experiments, EvoFIT has outperformed other current
composite systems (in the most recent realistic study, EvoFIT reached a level of naming roughly twice that of another UK composite system - details on request). An example of an EvoFIT constructed of a famous face is shown on the right (it was made "from memory"). EvoFIT has been in the press quite a lot lately; follow this link for an example. EvoFIT has also been used in a criminal investigation, Operation Mallard (Northants). Please contact me if you would like to use EvoFIT in a criminal investigation (note that this system has the additional advantage that a verbal description is NOT required).
EvoFIT is now available for police and research use. It also has a construction 'wizard', rather like a wizard use to install software on a computer, and allows a composite to be constructed by a novice user. Please see www.evofit.co.uk