The Buddy System: Human-Computer Teams

A prized attribute among law enforcement specialists, the expert ability to visually identify human faces can inform forensic investigations and help maintain safe border crossings, airports, and public spaces around the world. The field of forensic facial recognition depends on highly refined traits such as visual acuity, cognitive discrimination, memory recall, and elimination of bias. Humans, as well as computers running machine learning (ML) algorithms, possess these abilities. And it is the combination of the two--a human facial recognition expert teamed with a computer running ML analyses of facial image data--that provides the most accurate facial identification, according to a recent 2018 study in which Rama Chellappa, Distinguished University Professor and Minta Martin Professor of Engineering, and his team collaborated with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Texas at Dallas. Chellappa, who holds appointments in UMD's Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, is not surprised by the study results.