Impact of some biometric modalities on forensic science

Recently, forensic science has had many challenges in many different types of crimes and crime scenes, vary from physical crimes to cyber or computer crimes. Accurate and efficient human identification or recognition have become crucial for forensic applications due to the large diversity of crime scenes, and because of the increasing need to accurately identify criminals from the available crime evidences. Biometrics is an emerging technology that provides accurate and highly secure personal identification and verification systems for civilian and forensic applications. The positive impact of biometric modalities on forensic science began with the rapid developments in computer science, computational intelligence, and computing approaches. These advancements have been reflected in the biometric modality capturing process, feature extraction, feature robustness, and features matching. A complete and automatic biometric identification or recognition systems have been built accordingly. This chapter presents a study of the impacts of using some biometric modalities in forensic applications. Although biometrics identification replaces human work with computerized and automatic systems in order to achieve better performance, new challenges have arisen. These challenges lie in biometric system reliability and accuracy, system response time, data mining and classification, and protecting user privacy. This chapter sheds light on the positive and the negative impacts of using some biometric modalities in forensic science. In particular, the impacts of fingerprint image, facial image, and iris patterns are considered. The selected modalities are covered preliminarily before tackling their impact on forensic applications. Furthermore, an extensive look at the future of biometric modalities deployment in forensic applications is covered as the last part of the chapter.