ISSN: 0022-1198
CODEN: JFSCA
Published Online: 17 August 2005
Page Count: 10

A Large-Scale Statistical Analysis of Barefoot Impressions
Yamashita, AB
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario

Pressman, AE
Carnegie Mellon Univ., PA

Pressman, IS
Carleton University, Ontario

Kennedy, RB
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario

Chen, S
Statistics Canada, Ontario

(Received 31 July 2004; accepted 23 April 2005)

Abstract

In an earlier paper, outlines of footprints of persons walking normally were studied to determine whether different people make verifiably distinct footprints. Our basic null hypothesis is: given a footprint outline trace made by Subject A (Alice), then Subject B (Bob), a distinct person, cannot produce a footprint outline trace indistinguishable from that of Alice. We showed in the previous work that the probability of a chance match is less than 10⁻⁸. In this paper we report two new advances in our research. First, we establish a rigorous mathematical framework for calculating worstcase and average chance-match probabilities. Second, we repeat the previous experiment to substantiate the earlier results, but with an expanded population sample size and a more representative and significantly bigger repeated sample. These improvements and a new automated tracing procedure for extracting all numerical measures lead to a sharpened accuracy with average chance match probabilities of 7.88 × 10⁻¹⁰ for a general population. In other words, the odds of a chance match are one in 1.27 billion.

Keywords:
forensic science, barefoot impressions, footprint, principal component analysis, chance match probability, statistical independence

Paper ID: JFS2004277
DOI: 10.1520/JFS2004277
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