Great article by Biometric Update reporter Adam Vrankulj. Morpho and BIO-key fused their fingerprint algorithms for this contract.
November 4, 2013 -
Representing a $1.2 billion investment by the U.S. federal government, the FBI’s massive Next Generation Identification (NGI) program is a ten-year lifecycle project that hinges on biometric identification technologies and has seen privacy advocates butt heads with law enforcement since its inception.
Split into six “increments,” Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract in 2008 to design, build and implement the program on behalf of the FBI, which ultimately aims to enhance the abilities of the agency’s aging IAFIS from the mid-nineties.
BiometricUpdate had a chance to talk with the FBI about what the program entails, how it works as well as some next steps for this controversial project.
Increment Zero: Workstation Replacement
Increment zero went live in 2008 and was an overall “tech-refresh” of IAFIS workstations, replacing obsolete hardware with new high-definition monitors, as well as the introduction of modular and replaceable infrastructure for examiners.
Increment One: Ten-print processing
Increment one, which went live in 2011 enhanced the agency’s ability to perform back-end processing of ten-print fingerprint data from IAFIS, using algorithms from MorphoTrak, a subsidiary of Morpho. This initially saw a 92.6 percent accuracy rate, though according to Art Ibers, director of criminal justice solutions for Lockheed Martin, the NGI is now 99.6 percent accurate in this regard.
“We had increment one and IAFIS side-by-side for five days, and in those five days, the NGI identified 910 additional matches that the legacy system missed,” Ibers said. “We immediately saw value.”
This was an important increment in establishing the NGI, as ten-print records have been collected widely for years at local, state and federal levels, so there was a large dataset to begin with. Now, synced at a national level, law enforcement agencies say they’re seeing results.
According to Clark Nelson, a senior VP of Marketing at MorphoTrak, the company continues to invest heavily into research and development for improving its processing algorithms as even minor adjustments lead to significant improvements when dealing with big data.
“If you think about it, when you’re talking about databases of tens of millions – or upwards of hundreds of millions of records – and about thousands of searches per day, an extra tenth of a percent in accuracy can lead to hundreds of new matches,” Nelson said. “Even though [our algorithms] are 99 percent accurate already, we strive to go beyond that.”
