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Anil Jain from Michigan State University (one of the highest ranked h-index in Computer Science) recently published a technical report on the this subject [0]. The technical reports says that they were able to identify Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with a Rank-1 hit against a 1M mugshot background database.

[0] http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Face/...

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Except the Rank-1 hit wasn't against an image from the mugshot database.

..The notable rank-one hit for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an illustrative example of this potential. However, the hit was against a graduation photograph with similar pose that was tweeted after he had been publically identiﬁed, and not a conventional mugshot from a prior arrest.

Yes but Tsarnaev's brother was known to authorities. It's feasible for authorities to index his photo and known family members.

If they had put both faces into the search, and matched both with high confidence, the result would have sent up a huge flag because the known relationship.

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