English

Abstract

Impressions of footwear are commonly found in crime scenes. The quality and wide variability of these impressions makes their analysis is very difficult. This research will develop new computational methods to assist the forensic footwear examiner in the U.S. In this research work involves developing a database of representative footwear print images so that appropriate algorithms can be developed and their error rates can be determined. Algorithms for identifying special features such as wear marks and embedded pebbles will be developed. Matching algorithms to be developed will be for both the tasks of verification, where the goal is to determine whether the footwear evidence is from a particular suspect’s shoe, or that of identification, where the goal is to determine the brand of the shoe from a known set of brands. In each case a quantitative measure of the result of matching will be provided. In the identification mode, the tools will allow the narrowing down of possibilities in a database of known prints. Another goal this work is to assist the U.S. footwear examiner is homicides and assaults where there are no known prints to match. For this purpose a classification tool is to be developed, where the objective is to generate from the evidence a set of characteristics, e.g., gender, texture, shape, size and brand. This work will be extended by following guidelines of SWGTREAD and in close consultation with forensic footwear and/or tire tread examiners. Key wordsfootwear matching, morphology, enhancement, indexing clustering & classification, etc. International Journal of Machine Intelligence ISSN: 0975-2927 & E-ISSN: 0975-9166, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2012 Introduction Shoe marksthe mark made by the outside surface of the sole of a shoe (the outsole)are distinctive patterns that are often found at crime scenes. Shoe marks can be broadly broken into two classes: 1. Shoe impressions which contain 3-dimensional information (e.g., shoe impression at the beach) and 2. Shoeprints which contain 2-dimensional information (e.g., shoeprint on a floor). Shoe marks are common at crime scenes and are believed to be present more frequently than fingerprints [1]. A study of several jurisdictions in Switzerland revealed that 35 percent of crime scenes had shoeprints usable in forensic investigation, while in [2], Girod found that 30 percent of all burglaries provide usable shoeprints. More generally, footwear impressions are created when footwear is pressed or stamped against a surface such as a floor or furniture in which process the characteristics of the shoe is transferred to the surface. The tasks for the forensic footwear examiner are:  verification: where an impression is to be matched against a suspect’s print,  identification: matching the print evidence against a possibly Citation: Kadam A.B., Manza R.R. and Kale K.V. (2012) A Review: Analysis of Footwear Impression Evidence Collection & Detection. International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 0975-2927 & E-ISSN: 0975-9166, Volume 4, Issue 2, pp.-410-413. Copyright: Copyright©2012 Kadam A.B., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.