FBI twin research highlights why multimodal biometrics still matter

The FBI is using biometric data provided by twins to understand how identification technologies perform in differentiating between people who may look nearly identical.

For more than 15 years, the FBI and West Virginia University have collected facial images, fingerprints, and iris scans from hundreds of participants at the annual Twins Days Festival in Ohio.

The dataset allows researchers to test biometric technologies before they are considered for operational use and to study how their performance changes as participants age.

Jeremy Dawson, a West Virginia University professor leading the study, notes that developing modern neural networks can require millions of images.

The Twins Days collection is much smaller, but its importance comes from its concentration of participants who present a specific and uncommon identification challenge.

“By utilizing the twins population, we have an excellent group of people who all look alike to try to solve this problem,” Dawson says.

Identical twins have distinct fingerprints and iris patterns that allow researchers to assess if additional biometrics may be needed to confirm identity.

The work can help the FBI identify circumstances in which a facial match requires further verification through another biometric modality or documentary evidence.

A 2022 NIST evaluation used 5,938 facial images from 698 twin pairs, including Twins Days images collected through West Virginia University between 2010 and 2018.

NIST found that all the facial recognition algorithms produced high false-match rates when comparing identical twins. Most generated high false-match rates for same-sex fraternal twins.

NIST continues to report a false-match rate for twins in its ongoing Face Recognition Technology Evaluation. The findings support the use of additional biometric signals when facial similarity cannot resolve identity.

This became evident when a British traveler was questioned by border officials in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, after records appeared to associate her with an earlier trip to Amsterdam. The trip had been made by her identical twin.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  biometrics research  |  facial recognition  |  FBI  |  forensics  |  multimodal biometrics  |  twins