Accurate 3D footwear impression recovery from photographs

The recovery of footwear impression in crime scenes plays an important role in investigations to corroborate or refute information, or to narrow down the number of suspects. Casting 3D footwear impressions is a long-standing standard to obtain the 3D models of the prints, slowly being replaced by a less invasive method, 3D scanning. In this paper, we present an alternative method based on multiview stereo that yields an accurate 3D model and provides some benefits over existing methods. We evaluate the results comparing our reconstructed 3D models with the ones acquired by 3D scanning. We also examine the advantages and drawbacks of each method.