Caricatures better than Police Sketches

Interesting. When I've seen a police sketch and the person they identified with it, I can almost never see the resemblance. [Link]

In tests, volunteers were asked to identify people from the standard photofit of their face and from their caricature.

On average, a photofit face was correctly identified 20% of the time, compared with 40% for the caricature, according to a report in this month's Visual Cognition journal.

In a second test, the team led by Charlie Frowd asked volunteers to make photofits of international footballers two days after being shown a picture of them. The delay was introduced to reflect the typical amount of time that passes from a crime being committed and a witness being asked to create a photofit.

When the images were shown to volunteers, only 3.4% of them were correctly identified, a similar success rate as that reported for police photofits. The researchers are in discussions with police over the possibility of trying out the technology after future crimes.