Toolmark identification is an important part of criminal investigation. As criminals become more mobile, law enforcement services need to handle a growing bulk of toolmarks, originating from crime scenes and from tools apprehended in the possession of suspects. Such an exhaustive search can only be feasible using automated comparison criteria. On the other hand, only a human expert can give sworn testimony in a court of law and take responsibility for its accuracy. Consequently, the role of the automated techniques is to screen the accumulated corpus of material evidence for possible matches and supply the human expert with a much smaller set of toolmark pairs for verification.
Computers can also facilitate the handling of images on the expert's workbench.
They are not expected to replace the expert witness. The project focused on two types of toolmarks, corresponding to the compression and sliding categories as described by the Isaspro introductory page . A good model is slicing butter with a toothed knife. Consequently, tools were developed to project the image back into a 1D domain and to compare such 1D profiles. The Vidocq toolmark database stores the toolmarks and submits them to the Correlator.