  In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a report questioning the
scientific validity of many forensic methods including firearm examination.
Firearm examination is a forensic tool used to help the court determine whether
two bullets were fired from the same gun barrel. During the firing process,
rifling, manufacturing defects, and impurities in the barrel create striation
marks on the bullet. Identifying these striation markings in an attempt to
match two bullets is one of the primary goals of firearm examination. We
propose an automated framework for the analysis of the 3D surface measurements
of bullet land impressions which transcribes the individual characteristics
into a set of features that quantify their similarities. This makes
identification of matches easier and allows for a quantification of both
matches and matchability of barrels. The automatic matching routine we propose
manages to (a) correctly identify land impressions (the surface between two
bullet groove impressions) with too much damage to be suitable for comparison,
and (b) correctly identify all 10,384 land-to-land matches of the James Hamby
study.
