Crimes Of The Future Will Be Solved Using IT, Robot CSIs, Smell & VR
Sir Bernard Spilsbury was, by modern standards, an unlikely celebrity. As a forensic pathologist, he delved inside dead bodies to discover the truth behind some of the most notorious murders in the first half of the 20th century.
Spilsbury performed some 20,000 autopsies in his time, and took part as a prosecution witness in more than 200 murder trials. When Spilsbury took to the stand to give evidence, including during the trial of Dr Crippen in 1910, the jury almost always returned a guilty verdict.
But nearly 100 years after Crippen was found guilty and hanged for his wife’s murder, DNA evidence cast doubt on the verdict. At the trial, Spilsbury argued that a scar on the dismembered torso found under Crippen’s basement floor identified the body as that of the doctor’s wife, Cora. But in 2007, mitochondrial DNA analysis of that same scar concluded that the human remains were from a man and so could not possibly be those of Cora Crippen.
Criminal trials have come a long way since the days of superstar pathologists. Now, investigators pay as much attention to the entire crime scene as they do the body. Often, they’re searching for DNA evidence, but soon crime scene investigators might be sniffing out traces of perfume that could be used to connect suspects to a crime scene.
Sniffing out criminals
Researchers at University College London found that when two different pieces of fabric (one of them sprayed with perfume) come into contact, the scent is transferred between the two surfaces. In one case, 22 out of 44 perfume components were found to have transferred from one fabric onto another.
“Perfume is not a directly individualising type of trace evidence like DNA,” Simona Gherghe, the lead author of the study told Wired. “The combination of components within a fragrance offers the potential to identify when a perfume has transferred, and to distinguish between different perfumes, and potentially different individuals. In combination with other forms of evidence, this information may be potentially highly useful in forensic reconstructions to assess if a direct contact has taken place.”
There are more than 3,000 chemicals which can be combined to create individual perfumes, with most containing between 10 and 100 ingredients. Gherghe and her team isolated key components of perfumes and analysed fabric samples to find out how many of those components transferred between fabrics when they came into contact. This was the first study of its kind and much more research is needed to be done before this kind of evidence was permitted in courts, but Gherghe is already investigating ways of improving the samples taken from fabrics.
Reconstructing footprints with 3D modeling
Muddy, or bloody, footprints are one of the more obvious identifying traces a criminal can leave behind at a crime scene. When the eldest child of the famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in 1932, one of the few clues left in the child’s nursery, besides a handwritten note, was an incomplete set of muddy footprints. Crime scene investigators were unable to ever reconstruct those footprints, though Richard Hauptmann was controversially sentenced to death after being prosecuted in what was reported as the “trial of the century”. New footprint scanning technology, however, is making it easier than ever for investigators to accurately create 3D models of footwear and potentially pinpoint a criminal as being at a crime scene at a particular point in time.
Matthew Bennett, a professor at Bournemouth University has adapted software used to scan ancient fossil imprints into a tool that can be used by crime scene investigators. DigTrace turns digital photos taken of a footprint into a 3D model of a shoe sole. That model can then be compared with existing footwear databases, making it cheaper and quicker for CSIs to pair up a footprint with its matching shoe.
The software tool, developed with help from the Home Office and the National Crime Agency is freely available for use by police forces in the UK and overseas. The software uses a technique called photogrammetry where specific pixels in an image are manipulated using an algorithm so the footprint can be moved around digitally and mapped onto different surfaces. In the future, the researchers hope to be able to recreate 3D models from video footage.
Hearing voices from silent CCTV footage
Potentially much more useful than a footprint, of course, is CCTV footage of a criminal during a crime. Researchers at the University of East Anglia are trialling visual speech recognition technology that could reconstruct conversations captured on video even where there is no sound.
“Lip-reading is one of the most challenging problems in artificial-intelligence,“ said Professor Richard Harvey, of UEA’s School of Computing Sciences. The research has concentrated on training machines to recognise the appearance and shape of a human’s lips as they form words and sentences.
“Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment,” said Helen Bear, the lead author of the study into visual speech recognition. Deciphering the difference between “p” and “b” sounds on film has always proved tricky, but the team’s technology has made it much simpler to identify the differences between the two sounds.
Virtual Crime Scenes
Understanding what is being said on CCTV footage could give vital insights into how a crime was committed, or point to further suspects outside of those known to police. New innovations in crime scene photography, though, might actually allow juries to virtually visit the crime scenes themselves. At Staffordshire University, Dr Caroline Colls has trialled technology that uses 3D imaging and virtual reality headsets to let jurors walk through the crime scene in virtual reality. Barristers currently rely on photographs and sketches to familiarise the jury with crime scenes, and only in very exceptional cases are juries allowed to visit the scene itself.
“Scene degradation starts from the moment the crime is committed,” Mezheb Chowdhury, a PhD researcher in Forensic Science and Criminal Investigations, told Wired. Inspired by Nasa’s Curiosity Mars rover, Chowdhury and his colleagues created a crime scene rover which takes 360-degree video that can be played back on a smartphone using Google Cardboard.
“The rover is set free, it takes its photos and its video, it comes back and you don't edit the video at all. You export it to smartphones, put it into a Google Cardboard and just have a look,” Chowdhury said. The rover could either follow a path set by a crime scene investigator, be controlled via a smartphone app or navigate its own way around a crime scene using sensors.
According to Chowdhury, who has already demonstrated his creation to 50 police forces in the UK and USA, letting juries explore crime scenes virtually will introduce more “objectivity” into criminal cases. In the current system, barristers a can pick and choose which crime scene photos to show the jury. "It's just storytelling. That just takes out all the objectivity out of it,” he said.
If jurors could explore high-resolution, 360 images of the crime scene, they could decide for themselves what was worth checking out in more detail. Crime scene investigators would put the rover in the scene at the earliest possible opportunity, to capture the space as it was immediately after the crime was committed. It would allow investigators to categorically say “we were there, this is how the crime scene looked,” Chowdhury said.
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