TAMPA, Fla.–The Pentagon agency overseeing the Defense Department’s top programs to integrate biometric technologies and capabilities plans any day to release a second round of solicitations for the development and demonstration of biometric and related technologies in an operational environment, an agency official says.
Specifically, the solicitations will seek solutions in two focus areas. One is the use of a single sensor to capture multiple biometrics, such as fingerprints, vascular patterns and hand geometry, or a camera that can possibly capture facial and iris images, Greg Alexander, a support provider to the Biometrics Task Force’s (BTF) Futures Branch, says at last weeks annual Biometrics Consortium Conference.
This means bringing fusion to the sensor level, Alexander says.
The other focus area is in multi-modal matching capability with the goal to go beyond just the typical finger, face and iris biometrics to include things like voice, vascular and NDA, he says. Here there will be an emphasis on “algorithms that can adapt their matching capability to the types of biometric modalities available and their respective quality,” according to a briefing slide presented by Alexander.
The solicitations will seek white papers by the end of October, with proposals for invitations expected to go out in December. Final proposals will be due in January and awards made in February.
The technologies that will be developed under the effort are ones that are not in use yet, Alexander says.
There are four mission areas that are the focus of the science and technology (S&T) effort. They are intelligence, physical and logical access, forensics, and architecture.
The solicitations are the second in a two-year Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) seeking S&T proposals for development leading to prototype testing. The first-year solicitations, which were for FY ’08, went out last winter. From that round, the BTF selected 10 proposals from a total of 175 that were submitted, and has either awarded contracts or is in the process of negotiating contracts for those.
The selected and their projects are Aoptix for Development of and Advanced Handheld Iris Biometric Imager Brassboard and Demonstration; Cross Match Technologies for Multi- Biometric Fusion; Digital Signal Corp. for a Daytime/Nighttime Long-Range Imaging Multi-biometric Imaging System for Military Operations; Noblis for Multispectral Iris Fusion for Enhancement and Interoperability; Flashscan3D LLC for a Miniature, Non-Contact, Rolled Equivalent Fingerprint Collection Device using Structured Light Illumination; Honeywell [HON] for Acquiring High-Quality Iris Images from Moving Objects with a Fluttering Shutter; SRI International’s Sarnoff subsidiary for High-Speed Iris Biometric Capture; Scitor for a Novel Long-Range Illuminator; Syntronics for a Syntronics LatentMaster Fingerprint Workstation; and the Univ. of Houston for Face Recognition for Physical and Logical Access Control Demonstration and Assessment.
The award values for the current and future contracts are up to $750,000 each. Funding is being provided by the Pentagon’s Director of Defense Research and Engineering.
At the end of the development periods, the BTF is looking for a proof of technical feasibility and an assessment of performance, as well as how the technology can be transitioned for operational use, Alexander says.