A reference database of footwear to assist in the identification of shoes from shoe prints

The latest edition of 'SoleMate', Foster & Freeman's footwear database, contains details of over 16,500 sports, work and casual shoes. Its purpose is to identify shoes from shoe prints recovered from scenes of crime and it may be used as a stand alone system or with SICAR, the company's shoe print evidence management system.

Each record in SoleMate contains the shoe's manufacturer, the manufacturer's reference for that shoe, the date of its release on to the market, an image or off-set print of the sole, several pictorial images of the uppers, to aid recognition, and a set of pattern feature codes that facilitate search and match operations. Where different manufacturers have used the same sole unit (a common practice), SoleMate records are linked to allow the operator to consider all the footwear that might have been responsible for a crime scene print.

To use the database, the pattern of the unidentified shoe print is first assigned a set of codes, a simple procedure that requires the operator to identify elemental pattern features within the shoe print, such as circles, diamonds, zigzags, curves, blocks etc. These options are presented to the operator, pictorially with variations for the operator to select those that best match the features within the shoe print. The codes assigned to these pattern features form the basis of the database search. The results of a search are presented in descending order of pattern correlation for the operator to examine visually.

SoleMate is continually updated and distributed to subscribers every three months on DVD.

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