Discrimination of human and animal bloodstains using hyperspectral imaging

To address the question of blood origin, the novel application of visible-near infrared hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is used for the detection and discrimination of human and animal bloodstains. The HSI system used is a portable, non-contact, non-destructive method for the determination of blood origin. A support vector machine (SVM) binary classifier was trained for the discrimination of bloodstains of human (n = 20) and five animal species: pig (n = 20), mouse (n = 16), rat (n = 5), rabbit (n = 5), and cow (n = 20).