Using Just Skull Measurement New Forensic Software Can Determine Race And Gender
In the world of forensic science three-dimensional reconstruction of the faces of people who have died is old hat, regardless of whether they use computers or clay but both are time consuming so any new techniques that can speed of the process are always welcome.
Enter 3D-ID, a software package created by forensic anthropologist Ann Ross, at North Carolina State University, and Dennis Slice, a scientific computing researcher at Florida State University.
To use this software you just plug in the measurements of 34 points on the skull using a digitizer, which are then fed into a database that contains over 1,300 skull coordinates. By comparing the submitted coordinates against those in the database 3D-ID will determine ancestral information along the lines of “Hispanic of South American origin” as a opposed to “Hispanic of Mesoamerican origin” or “Hispanic of Caribbean origin”.
The researchers also say that the software will be able to indicate the gender of the skull as well as being able to work with partial skulls as long as the more important skull coordinates are still there.
via GizMag
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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