A reproducible pipeline for extracting representative signals from wire cuts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reproducible pipeline for extracting reliable signals from wire tip scans, improving accuracy and robustness over manual methods for forensic source determination.

Contribution

The authors present a fully automated pipeline that addresses common issues in wire scan data, enhancing reproducibility and objectivity in forensic signal analysis.

Findings

Outperforms manual extraction in robustness and objectiveness

Controls false positive and false negative rates effectively

Provides a reproducible method for forensic signal extraction

Abstract

We propose a reproducible pipeline for extracting representative signals from 2D topographic scans of the tips of cut wires. The process fully addresses many potential problems in the quality of wire cuts, including edge effects, extreme values, trends, missing values, angles, and warping. The resulting signals can be further used in source determination, which plays an important role in forensic examinations. With commonly used measurements such as the cross-correlation function, the procedure controls the false positive rate and false negative rate to the desirable values as the manual extraction pipeline but outperforms it with robustness and objectiveness.