Mapping Technologies for Crime Scenes

Traditionally, crime scene processing has involved manual measurements to construct diagrammatic representations of crime scenes. This is labor and time-intensive and does not necessarily yield a complete representation of any scene. Over the past few years, LiDAR-based scanners have seen increasing popularity in aiding investigators to make more complete digital, scaled, and three-dimensional representations of crime scenes.  While these systems offer a tremendous improvement over manual mapping, more recent advances in low-cost computing power and capture platforms, as well as AI/ML-augmented processing tools are now available. These tools offer the same or better ability to render crime scenes into highly accurate three-dimensional representations for a fraction of the cost and time. The webinar will focus on photogrammetry-based mapping tools to produce three-dimensional point clouds and meshes from drone-based and other image capture systems.