Identity-related frauds represent a major risk on the society safety given its serious consequences. These consequences may vary from small but very frequent frauds (telecom contracts, small credits, etc.) to transnational organized crimes and terrorist actions. An increasing number of false identity documents have been detected during the last few years, according to several official studies around the globe. The fast development of such criminal activities can be explained by an easy and public access to advanced technologies. Several studies have reported the organized nature of ID fraud activities and the progress of such black market. In order to fight against identity-related frauds, traditional investigation methods applied to identity documents (ID) rely on the presence of an expert, which significantly reduces the spread of such important verification in many administrative and commercial entities. In addition, existing ID control tools have shown several limitations, such as high false positive rates (rejection of valid documents), partial controls or nonexistent evolving capacities (new ID models, new control rules). Because of these shortcomings, automatic verification tools have not been widely used and their role has been reduced to data memorizing and simple assistance tasks. When ID frauds are detected, it is important to discover forensic links in order to identify the source of those frauds. Current investigation methods do not sufficiently address this problem and are still based on case-by-case approaches with no global analysis. However, an efficient automatic fraud pro ling system allowing to ID fraud link detection will certainly be of great benefit to anti-fraud authorities and will help to uncover many forgery worldwide networks. The core idea of IDFRAud, our proposition of an industrial research project, is to establish a virtuous circle between two processes: (1) the automatic verification of ID documents, and (2) the automatic profiling of ID frauds. The first process applies control rules on ID documents in order to check their validity, and sends detected ID frauds to the second process that analyzes them in order to discover forensic links (fraud profiling), and to enhance the ID control rules. Control rules are stored and maintained in a knowledge base in order to facilitate the system evolution. The knowledge base is also fed with existing repositories of ID document models (like Prado1) and ID frauds. In fact, adding new control rules enables more robust future ID controls, which in turn enable the detection of more ID frauds, and forensic links. The first originality of IDFRAud is to propose an automatic solution for ID verification that can handle documents issued from a large set of countries. The solution will be able to execute specific controls according to the ID model (type, country, generation, etc) thanks to a knowledge base. ID content and rules modeling is one of the main originalities of IDFRAud. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing formal description of ID documents and existing public and industrial ID knowledge bases cannot be directly used for automatic reading and verification. ID fraud automatic profiling represents a major ambition of IDFRAud. Experts from national security authorities along with academic and industrial partners will work side by side to propose the first data analysis solution dedicated to ID forensic link detection. Such intelligent solution aims at replacing the manual fastidious analysis that can hardly cope with a high-dimensional evolving false ID datasets.

Did you know that every year in the EU, around 1,300 new bloody crime scenes and several thousand bloody events are reported? iCrime aims to improve the resolution of bloody homicides and to save a bloody crime scene accurately and permanently. iCrime is a project around the use of immersive technologies from the crime scene to the courtroom. At a crime scene, preserving evidence is critical. The prosecutor, then the examining magistrate and the crime scene investigators have to work together efficiently at the scene. Tools are needed to help them visualize and archive crime scenes. When it comes time to testify at trial, blood trace experts must try to explain their methodology and findings to convince jury members of the reliability of their conclusions. Previously, the best technology that could be introduced at assizes was a passive 3D reconstruction presented on a screen. iCrime brings together experts from the forensic community, magistrates and a pilot court, academics including a leader in immersive technologies. Our aim is to remove the final scientific hurdles to the eventual production of a virtual simulator of a bloody crime scene. Our aim is to provide all those involved in the criminal justice system with a virtual reality archive of a bloody crime scene, which can be used in both criminal investigations and trials, and which features accurate and reliable physical models. The three scientific tasks of iCrime, out of a total of four, will help to achieve this objective: - Modeling of acquired data and automatic detection of blood traces (puddles or drops), - Development of accurate physical models later integrated into a virtual crime scene simulator, - Implementation and evaluation of an immersion plateform prototype of bloody crime scene.

Forensic sciences are central to criminal investigations since uncovering, collecting and analyzing crime scenes evidences allows clear identification of suspects. Improvement of existing protocols is thus a field of intense research in forensic sciences. Dactyloscopy which is the science of fingerprint examination has emerged as one of the most powerful tool in criminal identification. However, the current technologies are limited to efficiently find out latent (invisible) deposits on crime scenes. The most advanced technique is Cyanocrylate fumigation which is widely used by law enforcement forces. However it is realized in a confined and controlled environment (fumigation chambers) and so limited to small and medium sized objects. Lumicyano™ which is a fluorescent version of cyanoacrylate has recently been developed by Crime Science Technology Company and PPSM laboratory. It represents a strong technological advance in the field because, thanks to its intrinsic fluorescence, this product allows easier detection of latent fingerprint deposits on objects without the need of protocol modifications or use of toxic chemicals. Furthermore Lumicyano™ is compatible with DNA extraction and analysis. However, cyanoacrylate fumigation is still difficult to apply in the case of large volumes such as entire rooms even if precious marks may be present on walls, doors, windows… The CYANOSPRAY project proposes to develop a more efficient and easy-to-handle fingerprint development technique by replacing the fumigation of the cyanoacrylate by its spraying. The project aims to produce an all in one transportable device that can carry out easy, safe, cheap and fluorescent revelation of latent fingerprints directly on crime scenes. In order to reach this goal, fundamental studies of the fumigation will be conducted first. Indeed, even if fumigation of cyanoacrylate is routinely used in forensic laboratories, its mechanism is still not completely known. From such a comprehensive study, the crucial parameters for fingerprint development with cyanoacrylate will be highlighted, allowing setting the proposed alternative method: spraying of cyanoacrylate. Its room temperature spraying will generate liquid droplets that deposit on surfaces and reveal in situ latent fingerprints. Thanks to this approach, it will also be possible to include in the cyanoacrylate formulation fluorescent dyes of various colors that only need to be soluble but not with low sublimation point as is the case in fumigation. This will lead to a range of accessible colors that can be chosen to maximize the contrast with colored substrates. A task will be devoted to the preparation and study of compatible dyes including testing on DNA. In a second step, and based on the fundamental results obtained, different devices will be designed and fabricated that fits the technical requirements. Then they will be tested in laboratory on model samples for technical validation. Finally, the devices will be given to end-users (French police forces) for a final operational validation. In order to fulfill this ambitious project a high level consortium which combines all necessary competences has been gathered. The fumigation mechanism investigation and exploration of various spray process will be done by researchers from the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris at Collège de France (UMR 7574). The synthesis of fluorescent molecules and test of the devices will involve a research team of the laboratoire de Photophysique et Photochimie Macromoléculaires et Supramoléculaires at ENS Cachan (UMR 8531). PPSM will also coordinate the project. The fabrication and technical validation of the demonstrators will be carried out by the R&D unit of Crime Science Technology (SMB from Villeneuve D’Ascq). Finally, operational validation will be carried out in parallel by end users of the Institut National de Police Scientifique and Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale.

In the past, confessions and testimonies were sufficient to convince magistrates and members of the jury. Nowadays, the “scientific evidence” has become a basic element for criminal investigations. A recent review made by Brummer et al, 2011 entitled “Forensic quest for age determination of bloodstains” clearly states that “until now, using bloodstains to determine the time elapsed since the crime was committed is still not possible”. This time elapsed since the bloody event was committee enables to check the witnesses’ statements, limits the number of suspects and assesses alibis. With an objective of investigation costs savings and manpower savings, a quick orientation for the investigators based on an accurate age determination of the bloodstain is inestimable. In order to improve forensic protocol, fundamental knowledge are requested on the blood physical properties such as its rheology, wetting, spreading, fragmentation and drying; this is the purpose of D-Blood. Blood is a complex fluid which physical properties are not well characterized. Its rheology is clearly non-Newtonian for people in good health, its wettability is close to water but exhibits differences on soft surfaces due to the presence of colloids that change the contact line dynamics. While whole blood surface tension is very close to pure water, human blood serum is very different. All these physical properties are required to understand the spreading, fragmentation of blood and its drying and cracking. This ANR proposal intends, in the frame of specific applications, to answer “open questions” in both the scientific and forensic communities. In order to do that, we spread the work into six tasks each of them focusing on a question/problem to answer/solve. The proposal makes use of four French partners with all different skills on rheology (LRP and ENSCP), wetting, spreading and (ENSCP and IUSTI), fragmentation (ENSCP, IRCGN and NFI) and drying (IUSTI and IRCGN). Besides to the four French partners, NFI is an international collaborator involved in the research and has interactions with ENSCP and IRCGN in the frame of the application side of the proposal on the drying dynamics of bloodstain pattern and the fragmentation of blood on crime scenes. NFI will not be funded in the frame of this proposal. D-Blood is composed of four fundamental tasks. The first tasks T1 will provide the driving mechanisms involved during the evaporation of drops and pools of blood and other complex fluids, the second task T2 will provide the delamination and cracking mechanisms occurring at the end of the blood evaporation. The blood rheology and wetting will be fully analyzed in the frame of task T3 while the blood fragmentation and spreading will be explained in Task T4. The first four tasks bring inputs useful in the frame of task T5. In task T5 we will provide new forensic protocols to be use on crime scenes. All the data collected in the frame of these five tasks T1 to T5 will be synthesized in task T6 under the supervision of D. Bonn to achieve a consistent review paper. The expectations are important in the frame of the forensic community to have a reliable and efficiency aging method in crime scene. The approach that we choose here is very innovative allying the skills of fundamental laboratories (IUSTI, ENSCP, LRP) with applied ones (IRCGN and NFI). The outcomes on the rheology, wetting and spreading of complex fluids are also of great interest in the community. We intend to achieve at the end of the four years project several high quality papers raised in the frame of this proposal.