Stefan Britz will present the Department of Statistical Science seminar with a talk entitled, "Matching Bullets to Handguns with Siamese Convolutional Neural Networks: Literal One-Shot Learning". 

Stefan Britz is a lecturer in the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town

Abstract:  The successful prosecution of suspects apprehended for violent crimes often depends on accurate and precise analysis of the forensic evidence gathered from the crime scene, and the interpretation of the evidence by forensic scientists. One crucial forensic technique is the matching of striation marks on bullets found at crime scenes to striation marks on bullets fired from a firearm suspected to have been used to commit the crime. However, subjective interpretations of what constitutes a match have proven enough to convict suspects of homicide in the past. In this project we investigate robust, scientific ways of determining whether a specific bullet was fired from a hypothesised weapon by training Siamese convolutional neural networks on small samples of bullet images obtained from 4 different handguns.