So, who's the goodie... and the baddie? How you really CAN tell a wrong 'un just by their face (and it's all down to their lips and eyes) 

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It may bear a creepy resemblance to the film Minority Report, where people are arrested for crimes before they have committed them.

But scientists believe they may be able to pick out a potential criminal just by looking at their face.

Computer software created in China is able to identify someone who has committed a crime with up to 89.5 per cent accuracy, after scrolling through almost 1,900 facial images.

You wouldn't want to mix these two ladies up - one a society beauty and 1870s stage actress, the other a murderous nightclub hostess hanged in July 1955 for killing her lover

One of these women was a 1930s Hollywood star married to Clark Gable, while the other was a sadistic SS Auschwitz-Birkenau guard, choosing who to send to the death chambers

It found criminals have upper lips which curve around 23 per cent more and their eyes are closer together.

This type of science is controversial, linked to discredited Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso who argued that criminals were more primitive than the rest of us, with differently shaped skulls and asymmetrical facial bones.

There is no real evidence of why criminals might look any different, but the academics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University say their computer programme can be trusted.

Their study states: ‘Unlike a human examiner/judge, a computer vision algorithm or classifier has absolutely no subjective baggages, having no emotions, no biases whatsoever due to past experience, race, religion, political doctrine, gender, age, etc, no mental fatigue, no preconditioning of a bad sleep or meal.’

From an icy trek to a col heart, one was second-in-command on Captain Scott's South Pole expedition a century ago, while the other was a merciless 'acid bath murderer' in the 1940s

Philanthropist or fraud? One picture is one of the first criminal mugshots ever taken in Britain, while the other chap gave away millions to education and health projects

Dr Leandro Minku, a computer science lecturer at the University of Leicester, said the difference in facial features, including a narrower angle from criminals’ nose to the corners of their mouth, might be explained by non-criminals being more likely to smile slightly in photographs. 

But he said the research had been well-conducted, adding: ‘This is a very controversial topic, but one of the advantages of using machines is that they “learn” based on the data given.

‘They can analyse a very large amount of information which we would struggle to do.’

Aristotle famously advocated that you could tell someone’s character from their face, while psychologists have known for a millennium that we judge personality traits and people’s trustworthiness based on how they look.

One changed the modern world by inventing the Biro, while the other was one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust – truly one of the most evil men of the 20th century

It’s healer versus poisoner here, with one woman a doctor and leading suffragette who founded a London women’s hospital. The other was the first female serial killer in modern times

However it is unclear why criminals should look different, leaving the Chinese researchers interested in what we use to judge whether someone looks like a ‘wrong ‘un’. 

They collected 1,856 ID photographs, rather than police mugshots, of men aged 18 to 55 with no facial hair and no facial scars or other markings for the study. 

Half were convicted criminals and all were fed into a computer system ‘taught’ to tell the difference.

The best classifier achieved 89.51 per cent accuracy, according to the report published on the research website arXiv, which is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Spot the giver and taker: one woman was a violent Victorian shoplifting gang leader in London’s West End; the other donated millions of pounds’ worth of paintings to the nation

They both slicked their hair back, but one was vile serial killer ‘The Beast of Birkenshaw’, while the other was a brilliant engineer who invented a rear-gunning device for pilots

The computer system found there is no one typical criminal face, but many, with non-criminals actually having more similarity facially to each other than people who break the law. 

A summary of the findings states: ‘The variation among criminal faces is significantly greater than that of the non-criminal faces.’

It adds: ‘In other words, the faces of general law-biding public have a greater degree of resemblance compared with the faces of criminals, or criminals have a higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal people.’   

.... So did you spot the faces of evil? 

1A Ruth Ellis – murderer, 1B Lillie Langtry – actress, 2A Irma Grese – Nazi SS guard, 2B Carole Lombard – Hollywood actress, 3A Admiral Edward ‘Teddy’ Evans – adventurer and hero, 3B John Haigh – murderer, 4A George Perry – con-artist who posed as a vicar, 4B John D Rockefeller – businessman/philanthropist,5A Adolf Eichmann – Nazi war criminal, 5B Lazlo Biro – pen inventor, 6A Elizabeth Garrett Anderson – hospital founder 6B Mary Ann Cotton – serial killer 7A Lilian Rose Kendall – gangster known as the bobbed-haired bandit (pic of bob - hair) 7B Margaret Davies – philanthropist (pic of woman wearing hat) 8A Peter Manuel – mass murdering rapist, 8B EF Turby-Wells – engineer/inventor.