Reconstruction of ripped-up documents using fragment stack analysis procedures

Reconstruction of ripped-up documents can be a very time-consuming task for forensic experts. Currently, this task is often carried out using various homespun or loosely defined procedures. Under the main assumption that a (partially) ordered set of fragments can be recovered, we propose and discuss a more formal analysis methodology for this type of reconstruction problem. We discuss several complications that can occur in real-life problems and illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methods. Although several avenues for further research remain, we show that the proposed approach offers both a better understanding of the problem, as well as important strategies for devising very fast manual and semi-automatic fragment reassembly procedures.