Deep Learning for Forensic Identification of Source

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Patten, Cole, Saunders, Christopher, Puthawala, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913760972636160
author Patten, Cole
Saunders, Christopher
Puthawala, Michael
author_facet Patten, Cole
Saunders, Christopher
Puthawala, Michael
contents We used contrastive neural networks to learn useful similarity scores between the 144 cartridge casings in the NBIDE dataset, under the common-but-unknown source paradigm. The common-but-unknown source problem is a problem archetype in forensics where the question is whether two objects share a common source (e.g. were two cartridge casings fired from the same firearm). Similarity scores are often used to interpret evidence under this paradigm. We directly compared our results to a state-of-the-art algorithm, Congruent Matching Cells (CMC). When trained on the E3 dataset of 2967 cartridge casings, contrastive learning achieved an ROC AUC of 0.892. The CMC algorithm achieved 0.867. We also conducted an ablation study where we varied the neural network architecture; specifically, the network's width or depth. The ablation study showed that contrastive network performance results are somewhat robust to the network architecture. This work was in part motivated by the use of similarity scores attained via contrastive learning for standard evidence interpretation methods such as score-based likelihood ratios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20994
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Learning for Forensic Identification of Source
Patten, Cole
Saunders, Christopher
Puthawala, Michael
Machine Learning
Applications
We used contrastive neural networks to learn useful similarity scores between the 144 cartridge casings in the NBIDE dataset, under the common-but-unknown source paradigm. The common-but-unknown source problem is a problem archetype in forensics where the question is whether two objects share a common source (e.g. were two cartridge casings fired from the same firearm). Similarity scores are often used to interpret evidence under this paradigm. We directly compared our results to a state-of-the-art algorithm, Congruent Matching Cells (CMC). When trained on the E3 dataset of 2967 cartridge casings, contrastive learning achieved an ROC AUC of 0.892. The CMC algorithm achieved 0.867. We also conducted an ablation study where we varied the neural network architecture; specifically, the network's width or depth. The ablation study showed that contrastive network performance results are somewhat robust to the network architecture. This work was in part motivated by the use of similarity scores attained via contrastive learning for standard evidence interpretation methods such as score-based likelihood ratios.
title Deep Learning for Forensic Identification of Source
topic Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20994