Electronic Facial Identification Technique (E-FIT) is a computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

-based method that produce facial composite

Facial composite

A facial composite is a graphical representation of an eyewitness's memory of a face, as recorded by a composite artist. Facial composites are used mainly by police in their investigation of crimes.-PhotoFIT generation:...

s of wanted criminals based on eyewitness

Witness

A witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about an event, or in the criminal justice systems usually a crime, through his or her senses and can help certify important considerations about the crime or event. A witness who has seen the event first hand is known as an eyewitness...

 descriptions. Janina Kaminska at the UK Home Office

Home Office

The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...

 proposed the term in 1984.

Uses

Customers for this system exist around the world including Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), New York Police Department, the Swedish Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...

, Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...

 and recently the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

The system is used both in every day cases and high profile events. In the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, it is an ever present feature on the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's Crimewatch

Crimewatch

Crimewatch is a long-running and high-profile British television programme produced by the BBC, that reconstructs major unsolved crimes with a view to gaining information from the members of the public. The programme is usually broadcast once a month on BBC One...

television program. It was actively used in a case where one of the Crimewatch presenters themselves became a victim of a stalker and murder. The system is available in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 (US&UK), French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 and Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

.

The system has been programmed by John Platten from its inception at the UK Home Office. This reflects much of the history of the personal computer itself. Early personal computers only had green CRT

Cathode ray tube

The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...

 screens so the first version relied on television studio hardware. It was ported to MSDOS when the first VGA screens appeared, then to Windows and finally rewritten for Microsoft .NET framework in 2004.

E-FIT has since gained a 3D facility, which is complex and seldom used, a clothing system used internally by the police and, most recently, colour.

Research

The E-FIT and Pro-fit systems used in the UK have been subjected to a number of formal academic examinations, which typically show that both produce composites that are correctly named, either immediately or a few hours after construction, only about 20% of the time. When witnesses are required to wait two days before constructing a composite, which matches real use more closely, however, naming falls to just a few percent at best. The difficulty of accurately reproducing circumstances that prevail in real crimes, in academic studies, however, is a clear limitation.

During the early 1990s Greater Manchester Police's dedicated Facial Identification Unit recored over 55% success rate with the E-FITs created by their specialist officers.