Fast, Unbiased & Accurate Human Identification: Artificial Intelligence at the service of Physical and Forensic Anthropology

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The increasing number of mass disasters, and the untraceable (and shameful) number of unidentified people worldwide, combined with new challenges due to mass migrations, pose human identification as a great challenge in the preservation and defense of human rights in today’s society. There is an urgent need to provide forensic practitioners with accurate, robust, unbiased and automate identification systems. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to develop those tools, however there is an absence of industrial initiatives exploiting these emerging technologies that have so far curbed its application to practical identification scenarios. SKELETON-ID fills this technological gap by bringing a novel computer-aided automatic paradigm for human identification based on forensic anthropology methods, thanks to our innovative own-developed methodologies and AI-based automation algorithms. We apply methods of AI to automate identification techniques such as Craniofacial Superimposition and Comparative Radiography, through unbiased and accurate analysis and comparison of ante-mortem data (pictures, X-ray) with post-mortem 3D bone models; and Biological Profile estimation, both dead and alive, from X-ray to 2D and 3D images. Our platform provides a fast and low-cost forensic tool that offers complementary methods to other solutions and is applicable when other techniques are not (e.g. decomposed bodies, lack of trustable records). With SKELETON-ID, Panacea C. Research (a Spanish SME) aspires to be a global reference in the area of physical and forensic anthropology. In the long term, we envision becoming a human group highly qualified and specialized, capable of generating and hosting new ideas and products with a transforming effect.This project will greatly impact our company. We estimate that 3 years after project completion (by 2024), SKELETON-ID will bring us additional €7,41M revenues, allowing to grow our team to 43 people (+37 from current).