The FBI awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] a potential 10-year, $1 billion contract to be the systems integrator in the design, development and deployment of its Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which will expand the agency’s current electronic fingerprint-based database to include multiple biometrics to better improve the identification and capture of criminals and terrorists.
The value of the contract for the base year is $38.2 million. The contract contains nine option years. NGI, which will eventually replace the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), is expected to be operational in 30 months.
Over the first year of the NGI contract Lockheed Martin will develop the “architectural framework” and put in place the business rules and technology to support the different biometric modes that the FBI and Lockheed Martin will select to be part of the system, says Judy Marks, president of the Transportation and Security Solutions business.
Following the win, Lockheed Martin for the first time disclosed its teammates for the program. They include: Accenture [ACN], which will have responsibility for interoperability and change management; Britain’s BAE Systems Information Technology business, which will work on external interface requirements engineering, as well as security design; Global Science and Technology and Innovative Management & Technology Services, which are small businesses based in West Virginia that have been working on IAFIS and will provide program continuity and systems engineering; Platinum Solutions, which is currently working with the FBI Laboratory on related technologies; and the National Center for State Courts, which will help shape and oversee the privacy considerations for the program and provide guidance on interfacing with state court systems.
Still to come, possibly beginning as early as this summer, are additional announcements from the FBI for specific biometric components that Lockheed Martin will integrate into NGI. Lockheed Martin will work with the FBI on those selections. In the near-term the FBI is most interested in adding palm prints and the ability to match scars, marks and tattoos on people’s bodies, Thomas Bush, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS), tells TR2. CJIS is responsible for managing IAFIS and NGI.
The award to Lockheed Martin wasn’t a surprise given that the company developed and deployed IAFIS beginning 10 years ago. The company beat Northrop Grumman [NOC] and IBM [IBM] for NGI. However, late in 2006 Northrop Grumman unseated Lockheed Martin to develop the Defense Department’s next-generation biometric database, the Automated Biometric Identification System, giving that company some momentum heading into the NGI competition.
Additional Opportunities
For Lockheed Martin the win keeps a “flagship” customer in biometrics and gives it the opportunity to expand their business with the FBI, says Stanford Group identity solutions analyst Jeremy Grant. He expects Cogent Systems [COGT], Motorola [MOT], France’s Sagem Morpho and Japan’s NEC to all compete to provide the software matching algorithms for fingerprints and palm prints under NGI.
Selection of a provider for fingerprint matching software is about six months away, Jerry Pender, deputy director of CJIS, tells TR2.
In addition to expanded fingerprint, as well as palm print and body marking biometric technologies, other near-term modalities likely to be included in NGI are facial and iris recognition.
For the facial recognition component, Grant sees L-1 Identity Solutions [ID] as the favorite competing against Germany’s Cognitec Systems, with whom Lockheed Martin has a cooperative relationship. For iris recognition L-1 again is the favorite and is likely to go up against Cross Match Technologies and Retica, says grant. However, he sees little in the way of near-term revenue opportunities for iris because law enforcement agencies aren’t collecting iris images in significant quantities.
Also, given the fact that NGI will be multi-modal in terms of biometrics, Grant says there may be opportunities for companies like ImageWare Systems [IW] and Daon to provide the software to manage multiple biometrics.
Pender says that biometric fusion capabilities will be the last thing the FBI and Lockheed Martin examine to be part of NGI.
While the FBI and its industry partner will put together a plan for integrating the various mature biometric technologies into NGI, the system will also allow for the inclusion in the future of technologies that currently aren’t mature.
“The beauty of the architecture and the framework we’re building here is we will be exploring what is commercially available, we will be exploring what’s being developed in the universities, and will eventually be reduced to practice, and we will be holding competitions against technologies,” says Barb Humpton, director of the NGI program for Lockheed Martin’s Transportation and Security Solutions business. Emerging biometric technologies such as gait, which refers to how someone walks, hand geometry and even hand vein geometry, could someday be a part of the multi-modal solutions that will make up the NGI, she says.
“So yes there are multiple individual technologies but the architecture and the system will be set up to optimize integrating those to provide the FBI with an even greater accuracy,” Humpton says.
Currently 55 million individual records are stored on IAFIS with over 130,000 searches done daily against the database. Lockheed Martin said that NGI will double the size of the current database.
As Lockheed Martin develops the multi-modal biometric capabilities of NGI it will be giving the law enforcement community greater ability to store data about criminals and terrorists and also to identify and match those individuals against biometric evidence.
While NGI will be a multi-modal database, at least initially that will likely mean that users will search fingerprint evidence against fingerprints stored in the repository or search facial images against mug shots that are also being stored.
Users of the NGI will select the biometric “modality that is available to them, make decisions about the quality of that and make determinations as to how much accuracy that provides, and use it as appropriate,” says Humpton.
Eventually, as the promise of biometric fusion is realized, the hope is that a user will be able to input different types of biometric evidence such as fingerprints and face in order to obtain a greater degree of accuracy about who the evidence is pointing to.
Lockheed Martin and other companies as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology are working on biometric fusion.