Learning Wear Patterns on Footwear Outsoles Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Footwear outsoles acquire characteristics unique to the individual wearing them over time. Forensic scientists largely rely on their skills and knowledge—gained through years of experience—to analyse such characteristics on a shoeprint. In this work, we present a deep learning model that, for the first time, can predict the wear pattern on a unique dataset of shoeprints that captures the life and wear of a pair of shoes. We also present an additional architecture able to reconstruct the outsole back to its original state on a given week, and provide empirical evaluations of the performance of both models.