Comparative Analysis of LiDAR and Photogrammetry for 3D Crime Scene Reconstruction

Accurate and fast 3D mapping of crime scenes is crucial in law enforcement, and first responders often need to document scenes in detail under challenging conditions and within a limited time. Traditional methods often fail to capture the details required to understand these scenes comprehensively. This study investigates the effectiveness of recent mobile phone-based mapping technologies equipped with a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor. The performance of LiDAR and pure photogrammetry is evaluated under different illumination (day and night) and scanning conditions (slow and fast scanning) in a mock-up crime scene. The results reveal that the mapping using an iPhone LIDAR in daylight conditions with 5 min of fast scanning shows the best results, yielding 0.1084 m of error. Also, the cloud-to-cloud distance showed that 90% of the point clouds exhibited under 0.1224 m of error, demonstrating the utility of these tools for rapid and portable scanning in crime scenes.