About Verity
Verity is an open, domain-general engine for forensic surface comparison. It compares 3-D surface-topography scans — bullet lands, cartridge-case breech-face impressions, and striated toolmarks — and reports a transparent, calibrated likelihood ratio with region-level attribution. It never reports a “match”; it reports an auditable weight of evidence.
Who builds it
Verity is built by Eric Hare, a forensic statistician — a co-author of the automatic bullet-land matching method (Hare, Hofmann & Carriquiry 2017, Annals of Applied Statistics) that Verity’s striated pipeline descends from, and of the community’s x3ptoolsR package. He is the author of the project’s technical white paper and its maintainer.
Independent, and saying so
Verity is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or developed in partnership with CSAFE, NIST, or Iowa State University. The research it builds on is public, peer-reviewed work that anyone may build on — the scientific lineage page traces exactly what comes from where.
Open source & licensing
The entire platform — the Rust X3P codec, the comparison engine, the APIs, and this site — is developed in the open in a single repository, dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Bundled reference data carries its own upstream attribution.
How it's versioned & released
Released components are versioned and published: the X3P codec verity-x3p (v0.2.0) ships on crates.io and PyPI, with changes tracked in the changelog. Citation metadata lives in the repository as CITATION.cff. Every published validation number carries its exact protocol, and the repository has a dedicated issue template for challenging any of them.
Contact
There is no sales channel and no contact form. Questions, bug reports, and challenges to published numbers all go through GitHub — open an issue on the repository. Contributions are welcome and covered by the contributing guide and the Code of Conduct.