Application of three-dimensional optical acquisition to the documentation and the analysis of crime scenes and legal medicine inspection

This paper presents the activities aimed at testing the performance of a 3D optical system, designed for industrial and standard reverse engineering applications, to carry out the contact-less acquisition for crime scene documentation and analysis. In particular, the study focuses on two aspects. The former is the "in-field" measurement and modeling of crime scenes; the latter is the analysis of lesions, organs, bone tissues and skin wounds during legal-medicine inspection. Several study cases are presented, in order to show the high potential, the flexibility and the effectiveness of the measurement based on the optical three-dimensional approach. The paper is organized in three different sections. Section 1 briefly overviews the operative contexts and explains the purposes of the work. Section 2 describes the instrumentation and the methodology used to perform the data acquisition and elaboration. Section 3 presents the experimental cases.