A texture based shoe retrieval system for shoe marks of real crime scenes

Abstract

Shoeprints found on the crime scene contain useful information for the investigator: being able to identify the make and model of the shoe that left the mark on the crime scene is important for the culprit identification. Semi-automatic and automatic systems have already been proposed in the literature to face the problem, however all previous works have dealt with synthetic cases, i.e. shoe marks which have not been taken from a real crime scene but are artificially generated with different noise adding techniques. Here we propose a descriptor based on the Mahalanobis distance for the retrieval of shoeprint images. The performance test of the proposed descriptor is performed on real crime scenes shoe marks and the results are promising. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.