Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Accepted Manuscript

Publication Date

2017

Journal or Book Title

The Annals of Applied Statistics

Volume

11

Issue

4

First Page

2332

Last Page

2356

DOI

10.1214/17-AOAS1080

Abstract

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 help the court 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 one of the primary goals of firearm examination. We propose an automated framework for the analysis of the 3D surface measurements of bullet land impressions, which transcribes the individual characteristics into a set of features that quantify their similarities. 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 land impressions (the surface between two bullet groove impressions) with too much damage to be suitable for comparison, and (b) correctly identify all 10,384 land-to-land matches of the James Hamby study (Hamby, Brundage and Thorpe [AFTE Journal 41 (2009) 99–110]).

Comments

This is a manuscript of an article published as Hare, Eric, Heike Hofmann, and Alicia Carriquiry. "Automatic matching of bullet land impressions." The Annals of Applied Statistics 11, no. 4 (2017): 2332-2356. Posted with permission from CSAFE.

Copyright Owner

Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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