Abstract:
Bite marks inflicted on animate and inanimate objects will undergo a certain degree of deformation. This fact remains one of the
biggest stumbling blocks when analyzing evidence for court presentation. It has been demonstrated that the reliability of pattern association analysis
will not be affected by minimal degrees of warping, shrinkage, and distortion. In this study, affine transformations were applied to bite marks to
establish if minimal distortions would affect the mathematically determined relationships of the defined features. In a real case study, it was then
tested whether the distorted bite mark matched the dentition of the perpetrator by applying an affine transformation. This was confirmed to be the
case. Affine transformations will thus not affect the relationships of the individual features found in bite marks. The numerical calculations validate
the reliability of pattern association analysis in the presence of minimal amounts of warping, shrinkage, and distortion.