The Army has released requirements for a new contract to upgrade, operate and maintain the Defense Department’s authoritative biometric database, the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), with plans to transition the system to a cloud environment.
A draft performance work statement included in the Oct. 20 Request for Information says the Biometric Enabling Capability (BEC) Increment 1 will include operations and maintenance of the DoD ABIS and three capability drops over a five-year period. The capability drops will be done within 18 months cycles beginning award of the development contract.
Transitioning the DoD ABIS into a certified cloud will be one component of the first capability drop, as will adding a voice modality to the repository. The Army’s product manager for BEC also wants the ABIS architecture to be upgraded to allow “best of breed matching algorithms to include development of a matcher interface that is able to integrate and simultaneously utilize multiple industry search algorithms,” says the draft works statement.
The current ABIS system enables biometric matching of finger and palm prints, iris and face images, watchlist capability, and sharing with interagency partners such as the Department of Homeland Security’s IDENT and FBI’s Next Generation Identification multi-modal systems.
Leidos [LDOS] is the current contractor responsible for the DoD ABIS.
The system is based on-premise at the FBI’s Biometric Technology Center in West Virginia and includes a backup capability hosed by Amazon Web Services in the cloud.
Another capability sought in the initial capability drop is a custom watchlist for particular areas and countries of interest.
In the second and third capability drops, some of the features the Defense Department is looking to add include facial matching from video and video analytics tools, the ability to receive, process, match and store DNA references, biometric matching in less than two seconds, and algorithms for anti-spoofing and self-inflicted alteration of fingerprints.
Responses to the RFI are due by Nov. 19.