ITBA's "Dream & Memories" Laboratory and the Innocence Project

The Innocence Project highlights the discretion of the police for the illegitimate use of lethal force, the setting of cases and the judicial consent to incorporate such evidence as valid, resulting in unjust convictions of innocent people in a deficient judicial structure.

One of the experiments that the ITBA Dream Laboratory is carrying out is to help the Innocence Project in correcting wrongful convictions. The Dream Laboratory experiments with faces to investigate how the memory of a crime victim is corrupted and manipulated when the police lineup is carried out and a person is incorrectly identified as the one who committed the crime. Currently, the lab uses a very rustic algorithm to generate similar faces and experiment with them and false memories. However, this algorithm only generates a few faces, limiting the amount of faces to experiment with, and does not allow control over the features of a face and level of similarity between faces generated. This control would be ideal to understand how certain features and similarities affect the creation of false memories, and eventually understand how to prevent them in police lineups.

Nowadays, neuroscientists at the laboratory know for certain that false memories are very likely to take place when two faces have a very similar contour (face and hair shape), and it is the main goal on their experimentations to test this theory. Having an algorithm that allows them to generate very realistic facial images with a high resolution that have a level of similarity between them and also allows them to control facial features such as maintaining the contour of the facial images, would be a very powerful tool.

This meant 3 main objectives:

1. Generating artificial, realistic and high-quality facial images.
2. Obtaining similar but not equal facial images.
3. Manipulating facial features of a generated image.

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