Lockheed Martin [LMT] has completed the critical design review of a database for individuals of special concern within the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system and is beginning development and deployment of the capability, the company said last week.
The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) will consist of fingerprints from individuals such as known and suspected terrorists, sexual predators, and others. Lockheed Martin is developing NGI for the FBI to replace the existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) database with a multimodal biometric database- -called NGI–that is more accurate and also provides the law enforcement community faster response times on their queries.
“This capability gives law enforcement users more speed and flexibility in how they search the RISC fingerprint database,” Mike Moore, Lockheed Martin’s NGI program director, said in a statement. “For the first time, the law enforcement community can use web-based transactions, in addition to the existing data input mechanisms, to determine whether a suspect is a wanted person within RISC.”
The RISC effort is Increment 2 of NGI. The first increment, actually Increment 0, consisted of the delivery of more than 800 Advanced Technology Workstations to replace the IAFIS workstations used by FBI service providers and analysts.
Earlier this year, the NGI team completed final delivery of its more than 800 Advanced Technology Workstations a full month ahead of schedule. The new machines replace aging Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) Service Provider Workstations used by the FBI’s service providers and analysts.
The NGI Increment 1 effort is ongoing and consists of the development and deployment of a new fingerprint matching capability. The new fingerprint matching software is being developed by Morpho Trak, a unit of France’s Safran Group, and is expected to be operational early next year, slightly behind the original schedule.
The FBI would like RISC to be operational by the end of 2011.
Lockheed Martin said that design work for Increment 3 is underway and will enhance the latent fingerprint matching accuracy and introduce palm prints into the biometric database. Increment 3 is expected to be delivered in 2012.
The IAFIS system does have a latent fingerprint capability but in NGI it will be expanded, more accurate, faster and be able to support more queries. Future increments of NGI will include facial recognition and scars, marks and tattoos, iris matching and biometric fusion, which refers to the ability to combine the individual matching scores of different biometrics to increase the ability to make a positive match.