Forensic database system development for building paints

Abstract

Paint flakes are often found at crime scenes as trace physical evidence that offer significance importance for forensic investigations. Matching of unknown paint flakes with known case samples may provide clues in solving crime cases. However, manual paint sample matching of case and control samples is often slow and inefficient. A paint database system for fast data retrieval is much sought after by forensic scientists. In this study, sixty building paints were examined in terms of their color appearance, solubility and Fourier–transform infrared (FTIR) analysis. Ten diagnostic functional groups were selected in IR analysis in order to discriminate between the paints analyzed. The developed database incorporated data of the paint, paint color, solubility testing and IR diagnostic peaks. These attributes were utilized for data searching, retrieval and matching with the unknown paint samples analyzed. An interactive user interface was designed based on the type of data stored in the database. The system flow follows the sequence of paint color matching, then solubility result comparison, and finally IR diagnostic group matching. The developed paint database system supports easy matching of unknown building paint fragments with that stored in the database.