Three-dimensional footwear print extraction based on structured light projection

Evidence recovery and inspection of footwear prints in criminal scenes is one of the most important aspects of crime investigation. The conventional operational method to record these evidence is conducted by making of plaster casts or photograph, which shows disadvantages in efficiency, damage and accuracy. To overcome the limitations of conventional extraction method, we proposed a high resolution three-dimensional measurement approach based on structured light projection method, in which we developed an improved system calibration method and a self-correction phase unwrapping method based on gray-code. Corresponding experiments were conducted to verify the efficiency of proposed approach. Experimental result showed that rapid, non-destructive, high-resolution three-dimensional extraction of footwear print can be achieved based on the proposed approach.