• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.47-53
• /
• 2006

The Integrated Ballistics Identification Systems (IBIS) is widely used for bullet and casing signature identification. The IBIS obtains a pair of ballistic signatures from two bullets (or casings) using optical microscopy, and estimates a correlation score which can represent the degree of signature match. However, this method largely depends on lighting and surface conditions because optical image contrast is primarily a function of test surface's slope, shadowing, multiple reflections, optical properties, and illumination direction. Moreover, it can be affected with surface height variation. To overcome these problems and improve the identification system, we used well known surface topographic techniques, such as confocal microscopy and white-light scanning interferometry. The measuring instruments were calibrated by a NIST step height standard and verified by a NIST sinusoidal profile roughness standard and a commercial roughness standard. We also suggest a new analysis method for the ballistic identification. In this method, the maximum cross-correlation function CCFmax is used to quantify the degree of signature match. If the compared signatures were exactly the same, CCFmax would be $100\%$.