On the Feasibility of 3D Model-Based Forensic Height and Weight Estimation

Forensic DNA analysis has been critical in prosecuting crimes and overturning wrongful convictions. At the same time, other physical and digital forensic identification techniques—used to link a suspect to a crime scene— are plagued with problems of accuracy, reliability, and reproducibility. Flawed forensic science can have devastating consequences – the National Registry of Exonerations identified that flawed forensic techniques contribute to almost a quarter of wrongful convictions in the United States. Even some of the most basic, general-purpose forensic techniques for measuring a person’s height and weight are unreliable. We propose using recent advances in 3D body-pose estimation to estimate height and weight from a single, unconstrained image. The reliability of this method is assessed using large-scale simulations and an in-the-wild dataset, bounding the expected accuracy with which height and weight can be estimated, and providing a road map for further improvements.