Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces

[DGuller]

What is phrenology?  Is it saying that your face is the cause effect behind your behavior, or just saying that you can tell something about a person by just studying their face?

The latter, IIRC, about the shape of people's heads.

Then it's a bit of a stretch to imply that any attempt to accomplish such a thing is pseudoscience.  Other factors may affect both the appearance of your face and your criminal proclivities, or the appearance of your face may cause you to be suspected and caught in the first place.

[Jacob]

Then it's a bit of a stretch to imply that any attempt to accomplish such a thing is pseudoscience.  Other factors may affect both the appearance of your face and your criminal proclivities, or the appearance of your face may cause you to be suspected and caught in the first place.

I wonder how they sourced the pictures...

[DGuller]

Then it's a bit of a stretch to imply that any attempt to accomplish such a thing is pseudoscience.  Other factors may affect both the appearance of your face and your criminal proclivities, or the appearance of your face may cause you to be suspected and caught in the first place.

I wonder how they sourced the pictures...

I read the paper quickly, they described it.  There are a few places in that paper that made me a little skeptical, but by machine learning academic paper standards, this appears to me to be a pretty good one. 

They got the pictures of criminals from police, and the pictures of non-criminals from trawling the Internet.  They made sure that nothing about the actual picture-taking methodology remained in the data, and that the pictures did not contain any traces that could've tipped off the algorithm.

[Jacob]

I read the paper quickly, they described it.  There are a few places in that paper that made me a little skeptical, but by machine learning academic paper standards, this appears to me to be a pretty good one. 

They got the pictures of criminals from police, and the pictures of non-criminals from trawling the Internet.  They made sure that nothing about the actual picture-taking methodology remained in the data, and that the pictures did not contain any traces that could've tipped off the algorithm.

EDIT: never mind.

[LaCroix]

I'd like to see which pictures they used

FYP

I thought this was what they actually used until I read the text

re: pictures, so the program can tell the difference between a sad face and a happy face

[DontSayBanana]

Ugh.  Eugenics rears its ugly head, yet again.  The problem with this is that it's a false correlation.  Criminal status is also correlated with social status, which is also correlated with physical appearance.  This isn't scanning for criminals,  it's scanning for people likely to be penalized through the criminal justice system- useful in its own way, but knowing how social status decreases likelihood or severity of penalty, its usefulness for crime prevention is dubious, to say the least.

[DGuller]

The correlation seems real enough. 

[Admiral Yi]

Ugh.  Eugenics rears its ugly head, yet again.  The problem with this is that it's a false correlation.  Criminal status is also correlated with social status, which is also correlated with physical appearance.  This isn't scanning for criminals,  it's scanning for people likely to be penalized through the criminal justice system- useful in its own way, but knowing how social status decreases likelihood or severity of penalty, its usefulness for crime prevention is dubious, to say the least.

Social status correlates with the curve of your upper lip? 

[Richard Hakluyt]

There are plenty of meaningless but real correlations, a shortage of bananas in the UK correlates with us being at war with Germany for example.

[The Larch]

These features sound similar to the ones caused by higher testosterone.

There's one very easy indicator for high testosterone exposure in the womb, and that's finger length. If the middle finger is noticeably longer than the index, it means that mand had a high exposure to testosterone, if the fingers are roughly the same length it means he had a lower exposure. A higher exposure to testosterone has been linked to things ranging from athletic prowess (the higher your testosterone, the more likely you are to be competent in sports and physical skills) to predisposition to violent crime (the more testosterone, the likelier you are to commit it). By itself it doesn't mean anything, it's what happens in life what matters, in this case nurture beats nature. That's why things like the OP have the potential to be Orwellian nightmares, your features don't make you a criminal, your actions do.

[garbon]

These features sound similar to the ones caused by higher testosterone.

There's one very easy indicator for high testosterone exposure in the womb, and that's finger length. If the middle finger is noticeably longer than the index, it means that mand had a high exposure to testosterone, if the fingers are roughly the same length it means he had a lower exposure. A higher exposure to testosterone has been linked to things ranging from athletic prowess (the higher your testosterone, the more likely you are to be competent in sports and physical skills) to predisposition to violent crime (the more testosterone, the likelier you are to commit it). By itself it doesn't mean anything, it's what happens in life what matters, in this case nurture beats nature. That's why things like the OP have the potential to be Orwellian nightmares, your features don't make you a criminal, your actions do.

Damn, I want to know what happened then. Why aren't I a b-ball phenom?

[derspiess]

Wonder if this neural network can recognize my snail drawing

[grumbler]

The correlation seems real enough. 

But the correlation seems to be between pictures obtained from the police vice pictures selected online.  That pictures obtained from the police are notably more likely to be pictures of criminals isn't exactly a startling breakthrough.

[DGuller]

The correlation seems real enough. 

But the correlation seems to be between pictures obtained from the police vice pictures selected online.  That pictures obtained from the police are notably more likely to be pictures of criminals isn't exactly a startling breakthrough.

Does it?  The paper seems to go to great length describing the process by which they normalized the pictures so that backgrounds, lighting, equipment signatures, etc. are no longer a factor.  Also, while the pictures are obtained from police, those weren't the pictures taken by police, they were just normal pictures of people known to be ciminals to police.  Do you have reason to believe that their methods to normalize the pictures were insufficient?

[grumbler]

Does it?  The paper seems to go to great length describing the process by which they normalized the pictures so that backgrounds, lighting, equipment signatures, etc. are no longer a factor.  Also, while the pictures are obtained from police, those weren't the pictures taken by police, they were just normal pictures of people known to be ciminals to police.  Do you have reason to believe that their methods to normalize the pictures were insufficient?

If the photos of the criminals were taken under the same conditions as those taken of the non-criminals, then they are comparable.  I don't know why you would get any pictures from the police in a study like this; get the names of criminals, and then find their pictures online, just as you find the non-criminals.  Then you have a valid sample for comparison.

If you get some pictures from the police, and others not from the police, and you discover that there is a statistically significant variance between the two sets of pictures, you still cannot attribute the variance to criminality vice origin of the pictures, no matter how much you normalize for background or whatever.