Digitized crime scene forensics: automated trace separation of toolmarks on high-resolution 2D/3D CLSM surface data
Eric Clausing, Claus Vielhauer · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2015
Locksmith forensics is an important and very challenging part of classic crime scene forensics. In prior work, we propose a partial transfer to the digital domain, to effectively support forensic experts and present approaches for a full process chain consisting of five steps: Trace positioning, 2D/3D acquisition with a confocal 3D laser scanning microscope, detection by segmentation, trace type determination, and determination of the opening method. In particular the step of trace segmentation on high-resolution 3D surfaces thereby turned out to be the part most difficult to implement. The reason for that is the highly structured and complex surfaces to be analyzed. These surfaces are cluttered with a high number of toolmarks, which overlap and distort each other. In Clausing et al., we present an improved approach for a reliable segmentation of relevant trace regions but without the possibility of separating single traces out of segmented trace regions. However, in our past research, especially features based on shape and dimension turned out to be highly relevant for a fully automated analysis and interpretation. In this paper, we consequently propose an approach for this separation. To achieve this goal, we use our segmentation approach and expand it with a combination of the watershed algorithm with a graph-based analysis. Found sub-regions are compared based on their surface character and are connected or divided depending on their similarity. We evaluate our approach with a test set of about 1,300 single traces on the exemplary locking cylinder component ’key pin’ and thereby are able of showing the high suitability of our approach.