Technology has made significant improvements in the process of measuring, documenting and presenting physical evidence and crime scenes. The days of measuring discrete items with measuring tape and recording the scene with a few photos are over. Technology allows us to measure the entirety of a scene, literally hundreds of millions of points, accurate to 3 mm with the use of terrestrial laser scanners. Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones allow us to fly over busy highways and capture 3-dimensional data of 1000 meters of roadway in 15 minutes. Both advances have greatly advanced the use of close range photogrammetry, which allows us to extract 3D data from photos and videos and document positions of objects and individuals. All of this helps create a more complete, accurate, objective and verifiable data set for those who will decide the fate of the parties involved. This paper is a brief overview of terrestrial laser scanning, unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) image based three-dimensional modeling and close-range photogrammetry and how they have changed the manner which crime and accident scenes are reconstructed three-dimensionally.

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