Graphics Group @ ISU

The field of forensic firearms analysis involves the visual comparison of patterns engraved on bullets by the barrel of a gun. In recent years, computer vision techniques have been developed to complete these visual comparisons in an automated fashion. These methods, such as the one developed by Heike Hofmann and Eric Hare, are based on high-resolution images of bullet lands. We collected repeated scans of a small set of bullets in order to study the variability introduced by human involvement in the scanning process. Visualizing the variability in these data has proven to be a very interesting challenge! I will briefly detail the bullet matching process and our variability study, and share some ongoing attempts to effectively visualize variability in the data.

The slides for the talk can be found here.