A New Approach to Fuzzy Location of Cephalometric Landmarks in Craniofacial Superimposition

Craniofacial superimposition is the second stage of a complex forensic technique that aims to identify a missing person from a photograph (or video shot) and the skull found. This specific task is devoted to find the most appropriate pose of the skull model to be projected onto the photograph. The process is guided by a number of landmarks identified both in the skull (craniometric landmarks) and in the face (cephalometric landmarks). In this contribution we extend our previous genetic algorithm-based approach to the problem by considering the uncertainty involved in the location of the cephalometric landmarks and its influence in the matching between these landmarks and the craniometric ones. The new proposal is tested over two instances of a real case solved by the Physical Anthropology lab at the University of Granada (Spain). Keywords— Craniofacial superimposition, fuzzy landmarks, genetic algorithms, image registration.