Abstract:
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In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a report questioning the scientific validity of many forensic methods including firearm examination. Firearm examination is a forensic tool used to determine whether two bullets were fired from the same gun barrel. During the firing process, rifling, manufacturing defects, and impurities in the barrel create striation marks on the bullet. Identifying these striation markings in an attempt to match two bullets is the primary goal. We propose an automated framework for the analysis of the 3D surface measurements, that first transcribes the markings into a 2D plotting framework. This makes identification of matches easier and allows for a quantification of both matches and matchability of barrels. The automatic matching routine we propose manages to (a) correctly identify lands with too much damage to be suitable for matching, and (b) correctly identify all 10,384 land-to-land matches of the James Hamby study.
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