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.