抄録
Forensic biologists are increasingly likely to identify an individual using three-dimensional imaging equipment. Existing equipment requires taking the subjects to the place where the equipment is located. In recent years, a non-contact, hand-held three-dimensional color scanner has been developed that is compact and lightweight. Therefore, we already use it for facial recognition and cranio-facial superimposition. The three-dimensional scanner reconstructed skull images precisely, and the anthropological measurements obtained from the images were comparable to those obtained from actual skulls (the differences in measurements were less than 1mm). Furthermore, the skull images produced by the scanner corresponded with high accuracy to the three-dimensional images reconstructed using computed tomography (concordance rates were approximately 95%) and to the two-dimensional facial photographs of the same person (the differences were less than the standard value 2.5mm for the reciprocal point-to-point matching). In addition to the skull images, the three-dimensional scanner precisely reconstructed facial images of living people. The three-dimensional facial images approximately corresponded to the two-dimensional facial photographs of the same people taken from both the vertical direction and from a bird's-eye view (the difference were less than the standard values, 0.9mm for the outline matching and 2.5mm for the reciprocal point-to-point matching). In conclusion, the current study confirmed that the non-contact, hand-held three-dimensional color scanner can provide forensic biologists with precise three-dimensional images of both skulls and living people's faces and that the images are of sufficiently good quality to be put to practical use as the quality of conventional stationary type.
