Comparison of two forensic wood identification technologies for ten Meliaceae woods: computer vision versus mass spectrometry

Abstract

A wealth of forensic wood identification technologies has been developed or improved in recent years, with many attempts to compare results between technologies. The utility of such comparisons is greatly reduced when the species tested with each technology are different and when performance metrics are not calculated or presented in the same way. Here, a species-level XyloTron computer vision model is presented along with a side-by-side comparison for species- and genus-level identification of the 10 species of Meliaceae studied by Deklerck et al. using mass spectrometry. The species-level accuracies of the XyloTron model and the mass spectrometry models are comparable, while the genus-level accuracy of the XyloTron model is higher than that of the mass spectrometry model. The paper concludes with a call for better practices to compare disparate forensic wood identification technologies from a performance driven perspective.