Context‐based approach of separating contactless captured high‐resolution overlapped latent fingerprints

Abstract

Overlapped latent fingerprints occurring at crime scenes challenge forensic investigations, as they cannot be properly processed unless separated. Addressing this, Chen et al. proposed a relaxation-labelling-based approach on simulated samples, improved by Feng et al. for conventionally developed latent ones. As the development of advanced contactless nanometrerange sensing technology keeps broadening the vision of forensics, the authors use a chromatic white light sensor for contactless non-invasive acquisition. This preserves the fingerprints for further investigations and enhances existing separation techniques. Motivated by the trend in dactyloscopy that investigations now not only aim at identifications but also retrieving further context of the fingerprints (e.g. chemical composition, age), a context-based separation approach is suggested for highresolution samples of overlapped latent fingerprints. The author's conception of context-aware data processing is introduced to analyse the context in this forensic scenario, yielding an enhanced separation algorithm with optimised parameters. Two test sets are generated for evaluation, one consisting of 60 authentic overlapped fingerprints on three substrates and the other of 100 conventionally developed latent samples from the work of Feng et al. An equal error rate of 5.7% is achieved on the first test set, which shows improvement over their previous work, and 17.9% on the second.

Perfect fingerprint orientation fields by locally adaptive global models

“…Several research groups have addressed this problem in their work, and the key to the solution are in each work the OFs, see, e.g. [31][32][33].…”

Mass Spectrometric Imaging of Gold Nanolayer Coated Latent Fingermarks: Deciphering Overlapping Features by Statistical Analysis

“…They not just limit applicability in forensic cases but even the study of current associated research topics such as the MS analysis of fingermarks on different substrates, their transfer during sample preparation, their conservation, and even the processing of large sample sets to obtain evidence in marker related studies. Moreover, really fast optical methods combined with smart and powerful mathematical algorithms for the separation of overlapped fingermarks are under development and in view of this the main question which has to be answered is: How can expensive mass spectrometry approaches contribute further in a competitive manner to that forensic topic [15]? Generally speaking, time and reduction of manual and subjective processes could be crucial factors for the acceptance of MSI in fingermark analysis in the future.…”