The research involves implementation of a comparison algorithm for firearm forensics. The Congruent Matching Cells (CMC) algorithm and its associated CMF, CMPS, and CMX methods have been developed by NIST yet do not appear in any commercially available software. As requested in the call for proposals, we will implement the algorithms in the C++ programming language, we will validate their performance, we will develop similarity visualization modes, and we will develop a statistical scoring model. Across all aims we will evaluate performance using what is to our knowledge the largest set of 3D surface topography data of firearms evidence. The result of this Phase II work will be a great enhancement of our TopMatch software which implements import, visualization, masking, database, and search functionality. Most importantly the TopMatch software is already deployed and in use at a number of crime labs. Therefore, the NIST methods would get immediate distribution. Overall, we will advance the NIST developed CMC-Family of methods with realworld testing and will incorporate these methods into TopMatch, a fully functional software application that has already been deployed to crime labs.
