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In the present study a series of reflectance spectra of post-mortem lividity, pallor, andputrefaction-aected skin for 195 investigated cases in the course of cooling down the corpse has been collected. The reflectance spectrometric measurements were stored together with their respective metadata in a MySQL database. The latter has been managed via a scientific information repository (SIR). We propose similarity measures and a criterion of similarity that capture similar spectra recorded at corpse skin. We systematically clustered reflectance spectra from the database
as well as their metadata such as case number, age, gender, skin temperature, duration of cooling, post-mortem time etc., with respect to the given criterion of similarity. Altogether more than 500 reflectance spectra have been pairwisely compared. The measures that have been used to compare a pair of reflectance curve samples include the Euclidean distance between curves and the Euclidean distance between derivatives of the functions represented by the reflectance curves at
the same wavelengths in the spectral range of visible light between 380 and 750 nm. For each case, using the recorded reflectance curves and the similarity criterion, the post-mortem time interval during which a characteristic change in the shape of reflectance spectrum takes place, is estimated. The latter is carried out via a software package composed of Java, Python and MatLab scripts which query the MySQL database.
We show that in legal medicine matching and clustering of reflectance curves obtained by means of reflectance spectrometry with respect to a given criterion of similarity can be used to estimate the post-mortem interval.