New Face-Aging Technique Could Improve Search for Missing People

Scientists in Britain say they have developed a method of facial-age progression that could more accurately depict a person at different ages.

The method was published by the University of Bradford in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and was developed to help in the search for missing persons.

“Each year around 300,000 missing person cases are recorded in the UK alone,” said lead researcher Hassan Ugail of Bradford’s Centre for Visual Computing. “This has been part of our motivation in endeavouring to improve current techniques of searching for missing people, particularly those who have been missing for some considerable time.”

The team’s findings were presented at the International Conference on Missing Children and Adults in Dundee in June.

The method maps out key features, such as the shape of the cheek, mouth and forehead, of a face at a certain age and that information is fed to a computer algorithm which then creates new features for the face to produce photographic quality images of the person at different ages.

The researchers worked on creating photos of Ben Needham, who vanished on the Greek island of Kos in 1991 when he was 21 months old.

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