Toward Automatic Blood Spatter Analysis in Crime Scenes

Some scenes of violent crime contain blood stains. Blood spatter stains occur when blood falls passively due to force being applied to a body. There is a well established though extremely tedious technique by which a specially trained forensic technician can analyse the individual blood spots. This procedure estimates the body´s 2D location on the floorplan when the body was impacted. Our image analysis algorithm contributes an automatic and accessible alternative that could be exploited at crime scenes, assuming the stains are known to be the result of spatter. This paper presents our approach and the results of comparative experiments we used to confirm the accuracy of the algorithm.