Call for 500 ‘citizen scientists’ to help complete pioneering hand identification research

Researchers need the help of 500 volunteers to complete a pioneering hand identification research project which will deliver new forensic tools to ensure justice is served in some of the most heinous criminal cases.

Led by researchers at Lancaster University in collaboration with researchers from St John’s College Oxford and the University of Dundee, H-Unique is a research project aiming to prove how unique our hands are.

A prime motivation for the project is to find a way of identifying the perpetrators of child sexual abuse from footage and images shared online where the backs of hands are often one of the only visible features of the abuser.

The six-year research project builds on ground-breaking research techniques pioneered by H-Unique Principal Investigator Professor Lady Sue Black.

Her techniques have been used successfully in criminal prosecutions leading to many accused of child sexual abuse changing their plea to guilty when faced with hand identification evidence.

Lancaster University computer scientists working on H-Unique are building revolutionary new technologies that will automatically scan images of hands to look for anatomical differences and pull out identifying features such as vein patterns, pigmentation, knuckle creases and scars.

However, developing the technology requires a large number of photographs of hands.

The researchers need to assemble a research image database of 5,000 pairs of hands submitted by volunteer citizen scientists.

Thanks to the help of thousands of volunteers, the researchers are very close to meeting this target and just need images from 500 more volunteers so that there is enough data to prove beyond reasonable doubt whether our hands are unique.

They are calling for the help of anyone over the age of 18 – from all ethnicities, nationalities and backgrounds.

As we are coming towards the end of the project, we are thrilled with the technology that we have developed, which has broken new ground and surpassed state-of-the-art techniques in the automated detection and comparison of anatomical detail from photographs.

The public support for our research has been fantastic, and we very much appreciate the 4,500 people who have helped us by contributing images of their hands.

We just need images of 500 more volunteers to help complete our research dataset by sending us images of their hands via our app. It’s very easy and only takes around ten minutes.

“Our citizen scientists are making a really important contribution towards helping provide a new tool for courts dealing with these very serious cases and helping to ensure that justice is served for some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Dr Bryan M. Williams, lead of the H-Unique project

Volunteers can submit images of their hands using a dedicated secure web-based app, which was developed to make it easy for people to contribute their images to the project. People just need to use the web browser on their smart phones to visit h-unique.lancaster.ac.uk and click Contribute.

The app, which only takes around ten minutes to use, provides clear instructions on how to take images from the angles that the researchers need.

Those images are then sent anonymously to the research team and used as part of a research database for developing and testing the hand comparison algorithms. The images are not shared with any external agencies and will be destroyed at the end of the research project.

H-Unique is an interdisciplinary project supported by anatomists, anthropologists, geneticists, bioinformaticians, image analysists and computer scientists and is funded through a €2.5 million grant from the European Research Council.

Articles