A Case Study of Automated Face Recognition: The Boston Marathon Bombings Suspects

While face recognition can be a useful tool, helping authorities to narrow leads and confirm a criminal suspect´s identity, the media tended to highlight the technology´s limitations in the Boston Marathon bombings investigation. Consequently, we were motivated to reexamine the efficacy of unconstrained face recognition using this incident as a case study. We chose two automated face recognition systems known for their superior unconstrained matching performance based on tests conducted by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology: NEC´s NeoFace v3.1 and Google-owned Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition v5.2.2. To conduct the experiment, we added six reference images of the Tsarnaevs taken from press releases and news articles following their identification to a background database of 1 million mug shots. Against this database, we searched for matches of the five face images of the brothers extracted by the FBI from surveillance, smartphone, or point-and-shoot camera footage before their identification.