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]).
Copyright Owner
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Copyright Date
2017
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Hare, Eric; Hofmann, Heike; and Carriquiry, Alicia L., "Automatic Matching of Bullet Land Impressions" (2017). CSAFE Publications. 3.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/csafe_pubs/3
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.