Predicting image quality of forensic footwear impressions

The ability of a footwear examiner to confidently discern features of importance in a forensic examination is directly related to impression quality. As a result, quality directly impacts the strength an examiner can ascribe to any opinion of source attribution. Despite the importance of image quality during both the analysis and comparison phases of an examination, there is limited research on the estimation, variation, and prediction of footwear impression quality. In response, this study aims to develop a methodology for evaluating footwear impression quality by regressing image features against subjective judgments of quality. Using a dataset of more than 450 impressions evaluated by more than 40 participants, estimates of intra- and inter-rater consistency were computed. After identifying reliable raters, matrix completion was performed, thereby permitting data imputation. This was based on an approximate 90:10 split between training and testing data, ultimately resulting in 6,000 quality predictions, which exhibited a mean agreement with ground truth > 95%. Each image in the dataset was then reduced to a 10-dimensional feature vector describing image attributes such as complexity, contrast, sharpness, and noise. These features were used to train multiple ordinal and multinomial regression models aimed at predicting image quality. Model comparison resulted in an overall optimal accuracy of approximately 75% when comparing predicted/modeled quality against the ground truth of subjective rater opinions. The resulting semi-automated, reference-free and numerical prediction tool exhibits reasonable success for impression quality prediction when presented with the types of challenging and domain-specific images often encountered in forensic footwear comparisons. The outcomes and challenges associated with this investigation provide a foundation upon which future studies of quality can be modified and built, with the downstream goal of an increased understanding of how quality impacts weight of evidence.