Hand Forensics Are Catching Pedophiles With the Help of Artificial Intelligence

 University of Dundee and Lancaster University researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the process of linking suspects to child abuse footage using images of hands.

The current system means scientists must look at footage of child abuse, and use features such as matching blood vessels and movement to compare and match hands with suspected child abuse offenders.

But the process is time-consuming and requires a lot of manpower, with single cases sometimes taking up to two weeks with an 86% success rate.

The researchers are now calling on 5,000 members of the public, which they call ‘citizen scientists, to “contribute images to the world’s first searchable database of the anatomy and variations of the human hand”.

Algorithms will scan the database to find details that match a pair of hands to those of a suspected criminal. This new database could potentially be used to help identify tens of thousands of pedophiles daily and with a higher success rate.

The first-of-its-kind technology, called H-Unique, is being developed in a five-year programme with €2.5 million (£2.1 million) in funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Sue Black, professor and pro-vice-chancellor for an engagement at Lancaster University, whose previous research project is based on, said, “The hand retains and displays many anatomical differences due to our genetics, development, environment or even accidents so each person’s hands are different.

 Forensic anthropology is about the study of the human or what remains of the human for identification purposes. So whatever that's working with the police on a body that has been found unexpectedly. It might be a homicide. Whenever a human needs to be identified and linked then this procedure of forensic through artificial intelligence is used. The human veins are variable. If we Look at the vein pattern on the back of the right hand, and the vein pattern at the back of the left hand, that will be totally different. And it is also different in identical twins. So, it can be said that the veins patterns can be matched with the suspect. And if they don’t match with the suspect then it can be said with 100 percent certainty, it's not the same person because veins don’t change. Sue Black said, “We had a case in 2006, there was a young girl who alleged that her father came into her bedroom at night and he sexually abused her. And we had some images of a hand and a forearm coming into a camera view because she left her camera running on her computer. We did the comparison, we could show that the vein pattern between dad and the offender matched perfectly.The evidence was accepted but the jury found the dad not guilty. They just didn’t believe the girl because she didn’t break down and cry. That set up for us a real determination to say we need to have the underpinning research. We need to be able to say it's a one in a million chance, it's a one in a thousand chance. Sometimes we only have one anatomical feature. Sometimes we will have multiple features.  And the more features we have the more confident we can be, both in terms of exclusion, but also in not being able to exclude the suspect and the offender from being the same individual.”

 To catch a pedophile, you only need to look at their hands. 

Now, for the first time, researchers will analyse all the factors that make a hand truly unique so we can understand and use them reliably as evidence to identify individuals .Sometimes like a million images go on to the dark web every day In relation to child abuse. Hands are a part of the perpetrator that are most frequently found in those abusive images.

Lead researcher on the H-Unique programme, Bryan Williams, told The Telegraph that the project requires “a huge variety of hands”.

He said: “We want to be able to identify how to pick out blood vessels on white skin, on Chinese skin, so we need a huge variety of ethnicities and a huge variety of age ranges as well.

“We’re asking the public to use our app to take pictures on their phones, and then send them into the project.”

The images will be submitted anonymously through the app, will not be shared with any external agencies, and destroyed once the project has ended.