Facial Mapping
Definition
The term used primarily in the UK and Australia for the forensic comparison of facial images. Now largely superseded in international literature by the FISWG term Facial Image Comparison, though the underlying methods are equivalent.
- Regional usage
- Primarily UK and Australia
- Current standard term
- Facial Image Comparison (FISWG terminology)
- Method equivalence
- Same underlying techniques as Facial Image Comparison
- Status
- Largely superseded in international literature
Common questions
Why did the field move away from the term facial mapping?+
International standards bodies like FISWG adopted Facial Image Comparison as a more precise, discipline-wide term, and the shift also distanced the field from earlier courtroom criticism of facial mapping evidence in some UK cases where methodology and expert qualification were challenged.
Does the terminology change reflect a change in scientific validity?+
Not directly, the underlying comparison methods (morphological feature analysis, photo-anthropometry) are largely the same; the renaming reflects standardisation efforts rather than a new scientific finding about accuracy.
Related terms
- Conclusion Scale
- The structured verbal scale recommended by FISWG, ranging from Exclusion through Inconclusive to Identification, used to communicate the weight of facial comparison...
- FISWG
- The Facial Identification Scientific Working Group, a US-originated but internationally engaged body that produced guidelines for forensic facial comparison, including a standardised...
- Holistic Assessment
- Evaluation of the face as an integrated whole rather than as a sum of parts, drawing on the examiner's trained perceptual processing...
- Morphological Analysis
- The systematic comparison of qualitative facial feature shapes from a standardised feature list; the primary method in ENFSI BPM facial image comparison,...
- Photo-Anthropometric Overlay
- A technique that aligns and scales two facial images and computes proportional distances between anatomical landmarks, used when direct feature comparison is...