Evaluating the fairness of identification parades with measures of facial similarity
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis addresses a practical problem. The problem concerns the evaluation of 'identification parades', or 'lineups', which are frequently used by police to secure evidence of identification. It is well recognised that this evidence is frequently unreliable, and has led on occasion to tragic miscarriages of justice. A review of South African law is conducted and reported in the thesis, and shows that the legal treatment of identification parades centres on the requirement that parades should be composed of people of similar appearance to the suspect. I argue that it is not possible, in practice, to assess whether this requirement has been met and that this is a significant failing. Psychological work on identification parades includes the development of measures of parade fairness, and the investigation of alternate lineup structures. Measures of parade fairness suggested in the literature are indirectly derived, though; and I argue that they fail to address the question of physical similarity. In addition, I develop ways of reasoning inferentially (statistically) with measures of parade fairness, and suggest a new measure of parade fairness. The absence of a direct measure of similarity constitutes the rationale for the empirical component of the thesis. I propose a measure of facial similarity, in which the similarity of two faces is defined as the Euclidean distance between them in a principal component space, or representational basis. (The space is determined by treating a set of digitized faces as numerical vectors, and by submitting these to principal component analysis). A similar definition is provided for 'facial distinctiveness', namely as the distance of a face from the origin or centroid of the space. The validity of the proposed similarity measure is investigated in several ways, in a total of seven studies, involving approximately 700 subjects. 350 frontal face images and 280 profile face images were collected for use as experimental materials, an…
abstract: This thesis addresses a practical problem. The problem concerns the evaluation of 'identification parades', or 'lineups', which are frequently used by police to secure evidence of identification. It is well recognised that this evidence is frequently unreliable, and has led on occasion to tragic miscarriages of justice. A review of South African law is conducted and reported in the thesis, and shows that the legal treatment of identification parades centres on the requirement that parades should be composed of people of similar appearance to the suspect. I argue that it is not possible, in practice, to assess whether this requirement has been met and that this is a significant failing. Psychological work on identification parades includes the development of measures of parade fairness, and the investigation of alternate lineup structures. Measures of parade fairness suggested in the literature are indirectly derived, though; and I argue that they fail to address the question of physical similarity. In addition, I develop ways of reasoning inferentially (statistically) with measures of parade fairness, and suggest a new measure of parade fairness. The absence of a direct measure of similarity constitutes the rationale for the empirical component of the thesis. I propose a measure of facial similarity, in which the similarity of two faces is defined as the Euclidean distance between them in a principal component space, or representational basis. (The space is determined by treating a set of digitized faces as numerical vectors, and by submitting these to principal component analysis). A similar definition is provided for 'facial distinctiveness', namely as the distance of a face from the origin or centroid of the space. The validity of the proposed similarity measure is investigated in several ways, in a total of seven studies, involving approximately 700 subjects. 350 frontal face images and 280 profile face images were collected for use as experimental materials, an…
author: Tredoux, Colin Getty
language: eng
date published: 1996
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:30Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Psychology

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21840