PDQ—Paint Data Queries: The History and Technology Behind the Development of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Forensic Laboratory Services Automotive Paint Database

Introduction

For more then twenty years the R.C.M. Police Forensic Laboratories have been systematically gathering chemical and colour information on automotive paints. Initial work conducted within the R.C.M.P. laboratories showed that automotive paints could be differentiated by colour, layer sequence and chemistry of the paint layers comprising each of the topcoats and the primer system. Beginning in the mid 1970s, systems for classifying this data and the storage and retrieval of the information were developed and presented in the literature.