CSAFE March 2019 Center Wide Webinar

CSAFE invites researchers, collaborators, and members of the broader forensics and statistics communities to participate in the March Center Wide Webinar on Monday, March 11 at 11:00 am CST. We will have a short introduction from CSAFE Program Manager Stacy Renfro followed by the presentation “Similarity of two-dimensional images: An application to the forensic comparison of shoe outsole impressions” by Dr. Soyoung Park, CSAFE Post Doctoral researcher at Iowa State University.

Presentation Description:  Shoe outsole prints are often found in crime scenes.  If a suspect is apprehended and her shoes are potential sources of the prints in the crime scene, how might a forensic scientist go about quantifying the degree of similarity between the two?  As is the case for most other types of pattern evidence, quantifying the similarity between two impressions is challenging.  The traditional statistical modeling approach is not appropriate in these cases, so we turn to learning algorithms as a potential alternative. In this talk, we discuss a method that compares two dimensional images, one of a latent crime scene print, and one of a known shoe, and produces a score that quantifies the degree of similarity between the two.   The method we have developed is promising, because it appears to correctly determine with high probability whether two images have a common or a different source, at least for the shoes on which we have experimented.

Please register for the event by clicking the button above. Participating instructions will be sent to registered participants via email prior to the event.