Cape Town - A recent study by a forensic artist at the University of Stellenbosch has taken the conversation on the urgency of advancing South Africa’s investment in forensic facial imaging a step further.
According to the Stellenbosch University (SU) chairperson of the Department of Visual Arts, and interdisciplinary visual and forensic artist, Dr Kathryn Smith, for South Africa to directly tackle its “silent mass disaster” of missing and unidentified people there is a need for further exploration, training and identifying ways departments can work together to establish forensic facial imaging.
Smith said that within the current South African climate, it was regressive to still rely on fingerprints, DNA and dental records as the only means of scientific identification.
Smith, who completed her PhD as a member of Face Lab, Wilkinson’s research group at Liverpool John Moores University, focused on forensic visual identification processes, including reviewing records of over 1 000 unclaimed bodies from a Cape Town mortuary, critically assessing the associated post-mortem photographs for image quality and facial condition.
She explained that for skeletal remains, a facial reconstruction might be the only opportunity to attempt to identify an unknown person. But reconstructing a face from the skull is labour-intensive and time-consuming and may require expert cleaning before anthropological analysis and reconstruction.
In a recent report, Smith wrote on how not only was DNA an expensive means of identifying for the South African state, but most South African citizens cannot receive regular dental care.
She said forensic facial imaging was quicker and it was more reliable to digitally adjust a post-mortem photograph than to reconstruct a face from a skull.
“The training of forensic officers in post-mortem facial photography is a cost-effective intervention to deal with the volume of unidentified bodies.”
An estimated 7000, but likely closer to 10 000 unidentified bodies in South Africa’s medico-legal laboratories are waiting to be identified each year, according to SU. Currently, SU is the only institution with expert capacity in forensic facial imaging.
“While statistics are kept on unclaimed bodies, not all unclaimed bodies are unidentified, and in the absence of a single database where information on missing and unidentified people in our country can be easily compared, and in a context where there is just one forensic pathologist for every million people, the extent of this ‘silent mass disaster’ cannot be accurately quantified,” Smith said.
“Understanding the extent of the problem is further exacerbated by the lack of digitised case records in all but one province: the Western Cape. The identification of bodies is a task which requires close co-operation between the SAPS and the Department of Health Forensic Pathology Services.”
Smith founded VIZ.Lab, a research group at SU that promotes research in forensic identification and experiments with digital design and visualisation methods. She advocates for the training of forensic officers in post-mortem facial photography as a cost-effective intervention.
She has offered such training to about 90 forensic officers and undertakers as part of a pilot project of the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, an initiative she co-founded in 2021 with colleagues from UCT and SU to apply multi-factorial analyses to complex identification cases in the province.
SU spokesperson Martin Viljoen said he was excited by the opportunities which artificial intelligence and digitisation offer the field of forensic human identification.
Smith is in discussion with SU’s School for Data Science and Computational Thinking about ways to explore synthetic imaging and how data on the missing and unidentified may be better consolidated and compared.