Sketch-based modeling and immersive display techniques for indoor crime scene presentation

Abstract

The reconstruction of crime scene plays an important role in digital forensic application. Although the 3D scanning technique is popular in general scene reconstruction, it has great limitation in the practice use of crime scene presentation. This article integrates computer graphics, sketch-based modeling and virtual reality (VR) techniques to develop a low-cost and rapid 3D crime scene presentation approach, which can be used by investigators to analyze and simulate the criminal process. First, we constructed a collection of 3D models for indoor crime scenes using various popular techniques, including laser scanning, image-based modeling and software-modeling. Second, to quickly obtain an object of interest from the 3D model database that is consistent with the geometric structure of the real object, a sketch-based retrieval method was proposed. Finally, a rapid modeling system that integrates our database and retrieval algorithm was developed to quickly build a digital crime scene. For practical use, an interactive real-time virtual roaming application was developed in Unity 3D and a low-cost VR head-mounted display (HMD). Practical cases have been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and availability of our method.