Posts Tagged ‘mapping’

By Guillermo X. Garcia - Express-News

Bexar County’s criminal investigators soon will have cutting-edge help as they comb through crime scenes: a 3-D, computerized laser scanning system.

County commissioners approved the $207,000 purchase Tuesday.

“This is state-of-the-art equipment,” said Jose Treviño, the Sheriff’s Office homicide supervisor. “This will provide much more accurate data, and much quicker, to investigators at the scene.”

The system, which will be operational by March, takes a 3-D electronic photograph that plots objects in a 360-degree scan.

The unit “will all but eliminate human error” when it comes to measuring and plotting crime scene evidence, Treviño said.

“Eliminating the human error means you’ll have much greater chance that evidence won’t be missed,” he added. “It also guarantees much more accuracy in documenting the evidence’s location.”

Law enforcement officials say they plan to use the tool to probe major incidents, such as bank robberies, homicides and large-scale traffic accidents.

Leica Geosystems announces three new laser scanning software products for scan data import, forensic scene mapping, and modeling complex 3D surfaces. Combined, these products increase the breadth and depth of laser scanning software solutions available from Leica Geosystems.

A new, standalone Cyclone IMPORTER module is part of the separately announced, enhanced Cyclone 7.0 software suite. This new “open systems” module enables the direct use by Cyclone of scan data. Direct import of native data formats avoids conversion steps to neutral formats that can be time consuming and that are generally not as efficient for downstream data processing. Overall, it lets users of scan data from 3rd party scanners take better advantage of the broad capabilities in the Cyclone suite of software.