Development of Latent Fingermarks on Surfaces of Food-A More Realistic Approach

Fingermarks in wildlife forensics: A review

Wildlife forensics is defined as providing forensic evidence to support legal investigations involving wildlife crime, such as the trafficking and poaching of animals and/ or their goods. While wildlife forensics is an underexplored field of science, the ramifications of poaching can be catastrophic. The consequences of wildlife crime include disease spread, species and habitat loss, human injury, and cultural loss. Efforts to use forensic science to combat poaching are currently limited to DNA-based techniques. However, fingermark analysis for the identification of perpetrators of wildlife crimes has not been explored to the same extent, despite being a cost-effective, simple-to-use forensic method that is easy to deploy in-field. This review covers literature that has explored fingermark examination techniques used on wildlife-related samples, such as pangolin scales, ivory-based substances, bone, and eggs, as well as feathers and skins, among more obscure trafficked items. Useful preliminary work has been conducted in this subject area, demonstrating that commonly used fingermark analysis techniques can be applied to wildlife-based items. However, many of these studies suffer from limitations in terms of experimental design. More work should be done on creating studies with larger sample sizes and novel approaches should be validated under environmental conditions that mimic real crime scenes. Further research into determining the forensic fingermark analysis techniques that perform the most efficiently in the environmental conditions of the countries where they are needed would therefore benefit legal investigations and help to reduce instances of poaching.

Fingermark quality assessment, a transversal study of subjective quality scales

Fingermark detection research aims to improve the quantity and quality of fingermarks detected through the development of novel techniques. Subsequently, there is a need to evaluate these methods to determine the quality of the developed mark. Since the 1980's there has been a significant number of publications, which utilise a variety of different quality assessment methods. The introduction of common practice methods from the International Fingerprint Research Group (IFRG) aimed to implement a more standardised approach. Although these schemes are recommended as common practice, they are only guidelines. Consequentially, there is currently no universally accepted method to evaluate the enhancement techniques implemented in research. Therefore, this study aimed to collate and analyse the published protocols being used within fingermark detection research in order to better understand their application and how research is currently analysing and interpreting fingermark quality. This study comprised of manual and automatic searches of over 2000 published papers within the fingermark detection area. After thorough analysis of the articles, 396 published papers were found to have used a scale within the years spanning 1998-2022. The number of publications that report the use of a scale to assess quality for fingermark detection research has considerably increased over the last decade. However, whilst the number of publications utilising scales has increased, it is not proportional to the number of papers using the IFRG scales. The choice of scale is often institution specific and even more specific to their location. There are also numerous different adaptations of the IFRG recommended scales, as well as novel scales, which do not associate with the IFRG recommended versions being introduced the more research continues to grow. One such reason for this is investigated here, as different quality parameters are utilised within each individual scale. There is underrepresentation of these quality parameters within some of the IFRG scales, in particular the Centre for Applied Science and Technology (CAST) scale. This correlates to the considerable number of tailored approaches as authors are forced to add these parameters within the descriptions. Until there is an introduction of clear guidelines surrounding all areas of fingermark quality, from definition to parameters chosen within phases, the research area will continue to face such issues. This article recommends areas of potential study, whilst also recommending procedures that may be employed to alleviate some of the issues seen with fingermark quality evaluation.