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Prospects for using 3D printing in crime investigations in Ukraine. In the age of modern technology, the concept of 3D is firmly entrenched in our daily lives. 3D is associated with cinema, animation or photography.
It is unlikely that there is such a person now who would not have heard about such a technological novelty as 3D printing. 3D technologies are widely used in medicine: 3D printing of finished implants and various types of prototypes, dental and not only prostheses.
3D printing is intensively used for the manufacture of orthopedic corsets and auxiliary devices for the treatment of diseases of the musculoskeletal system and various complex devices for surgery.
To produce such things for medicine, 3D printing must meet high requirements. One of these requirements is the high definition of copying objects, as well as scanning without destroying the copied object.
It is this possibility of a 3D scanner and printer, together with modern computer programs, that can be used with great success in forensics, since it is a whole electronic system.
One of the possibilities of this method is that it is possible to quickly take a 3D print of shoes or tires at a crime scene with modern optical 3D measuring equipment. 3D data analysis greatly facilitates the work of forensic medical examination.
Digitization of prints simplifies the use of “forensic intelligence” (electronic system) methods, as it allows automatic 3D alignment of prints, and also allows full use of the system from the crime scene to the courtroom.
A fundamentally new approach to solving the collection and analysis of footprints of shoes and tires red-handed can be 3D data recording.
Since red-handed tire or shoe prints are valuable evidence, forensic scientists pay a lot of attention to them. Plaster casts are usually used to recognize and fix traces. Identification is done by specialists who examine the prints for characteristic features such as holes or scratches, etc., and give a proper assessment.
The use of plaster casts has many disadvantages such as long process of preparation and drying of plaster casts, low characterization accuracy, contamination of the trace itself, automatic alignment of prints is excluded, no digital 3D print data, plaster prints must be physically and transported with care. printAtkov needs the help of a specialist, artifacts such as hair must be removed before a plaster cast of the mark is made.
An advantage on the 3D side is that a number of programs allow later analysis of the combined 3D color data of shoe or tire prints. Features of shoe or tire prints are determined by the investigator by matching the prints with the image of manufacturers or other databases.
The unsurpassed feature of this method is that the collection of shoe and tire prints will take only a few seconds directly at the crime scene, non-contact measurement without damaging the prints, analysis of types of shoes and tires and their characteristic differences for identification and equalization of prints, simple and convenient exchange of 3D digital – data, combining measurement data with 3D data from other devices, such as data from laser scanners.
In my opinion, such a modern approach to red-handed fingerprinting will undoubtedly make the work of forensic scientists easier and speed up the detection of a crime, since it has many advantages over the methods currently used by experts.
Prospects for the use of 3D printing in crime investigations in Ukraine – 2018
