To Catch A Sexual Predator -- Morph Software for Police Work

I think that I have come up with a new crime-fighting technique.  It is the use of morphing software for police sketches.  Let me explain.

The police in Ottawa Canada have a problem.  There is a sexual predator loose in the city.  He chokes women as he sexually attacks them.  He hasn't killed yet, but his escalation of attacks might cause him to do so.

There are two police sketches of him.  As this serial sexual predator attacks, the police artists make a sketch.  Recently the police realized that the two sketches were the same person.  They published them in the online paper, looking for help from the public.  After all, when serial murderer and serial killer Paul Bernardo, the husband of killer Karla Homolka was just the Scarborough rapist, the police artists created a sketch.  It was on the bulletin board where Bernardo worked as an accountant trainee, and someone had penciled the word "Paul" on it because the sketch looked like him.  They thought that it was a joke.

The paper published sketch 1.  It looks like this:

The second police artist sketch of a second attack looked like this:

Even though they don't look alike at all, there are some common features. There is the thick eyebrows, the thick lips, and an exposed forehead.  This is what the scared victims of the sexual assaults remember the perpetrator by.

I got to thinking, that perhaps I could combine the two with morphing software.  I downloaded the photographs from the online newspaper and fed them into the morphing software.  This software has many features.

The first rendition was a 50/50 mix of the two sketches.  It looks like this:

Then I re-did the morph with the supposition that perhaps the first sketch was more accurate.  This was the source wrap, and the source wrap morph came out this way:

The next logical step was that perhaps the target or sketch 2 was more accurate.  This is called the Target Wrap and it looked like this:

The next two renditions were half way renditions from sketch 1 and sketch two to the 50-50 composite.  The first one is half way between sketch 1 and the 50-50 merge, and it looks like this:

The second is half way from the target sketch 2 and it looks like this:

Needless to say, the police investigator now has these renditions in his possession and I will keep the blog informed on the developments and how this exercise turned out in crime-fighting.