Testing and validating AnTraGoS algorithms with impact beating spatters

TL;DR

This paper validates the effectiveness of the AnTraGoS software, used by Italian police, in reconstructing blood spatter origins, confirming its accuracy and providing insights into height estimation through statistical and fluid dynamics methods.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the validity of AnTraGoS algorithms on published datasets and offers new suggestions for estimating height of origin using statistical and fluid dynamic approaches.

Findings

AnTraGoS algorithms are validated on a published dataset.

The software accurately identifies the area of convergence.

New methods for height estimation are proposed.

Abstract

The reconstruction of the area of origin of spatter patterns is usually a fundamental step to the determination of the area of the crime scene where the victim was wounded. In this field, for almost a decade, the italian Polizia di Stato has employed AnTraGoS, a forensic software which implements a probabilistic approach to identify the area where the horizontal projections of the trajectories of a set of blood drops converge (area of convergence) and to estimate the height of origin. In this paper we summarize a series of tests performed on a published dataset of spatter patterns, whose results confirm the validity of AnTraGoS and of its algorithms. As a side result, some useful suggestions are derived, concerning the determination of the height of origin, within a statistical and fluid dynamic approach.