The wear patterns of your jeans aren?t good forensic evidence

A paper published in PNAS this week puts denim-pattern analysis through its paces, finding that it isn’t particularly good at matching up identical pairs of jeans—and may create a number of “false alarm” errors to boot.For some time, there have been rumblings about the reliability and quality of commonly-used forensic techniques. Based on these measurements, Nightingale and Farid worked out the range of similarity between the "barcode" patterns on different pairs of jeans.The important question, of course, is whether these patterns can be used to determine whether two images show the same pair of jeans. The range was broad—as Nightingale and Farid point out, soft fabric photographed in a bunch of different ways is going to have distortions that vary from one image to the next.So, if one pair of jeans can look noticeably different in different photos, is denim-pattern analysis actually a useful forensic technique?