Ballistics Firearm Identification by Digital Holography

Abstract

The need for firearm identification systems by police services continues to increase with greater accessibility to weapons in the national and international contexts. The difficulties associated with traditional imaging of ballistics specimens are numerous, and include the smallness of the samples, the nature of the surfaces and shapes for the cartridge cases and projectiles. The digital holography has been introduced to create the 3D image of the fired bullets in order to identify firearms. In digital holography a CCD camera records optically generated holograms which is then reconstructed numerically by a calculation of scalar diffraction in the Fresnel approximation. The digital photography facilitates real time transmission of the message via traditional communication methods. In this paper the principle of digital holography and its application to the 3D image encryption-decryption were reviewed. The experimental results of firearm identification recording using digital holography and their numerical reconstruction were presented.