The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate soon plans to issue a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) related to the development of mobile biometric systems that can capture multiple fingerprints at once, an S&T official tells TR2.
The forthcoming BAA follows a requirements gathering session last year from the operational component agencies of DHS to get a handle on long and short-term needs, says Arun Vemury, a program manager with S&T’s Innovations Office who is also working for the directorate’s Human Factors Division.
“We looked at what industry was providing and we picked out something that was not being addressed and something that DHS needed,” Vemury said. Currently the kinds of mobile fingerprint reader and capture devices being used by DHS components are single-finger units such what the Coast Guard is acquiring under the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program and what it has deployed on its 110-foot cutters in the Mona Passage and Florida Straits.
A key driver for the multi-finger capture devices is the avoidance of sequence errors, Vemury says. Sequence errors are basically mistakes made by users of the devices such as when the operator captures a print of a person’s right-index finger and logs it as the left finger. When searches are done against biometric databases they are specific to a particular finger, say right-index finger to right-index finger, he says.
“When you have all four fingers next to each other you can tell which is which,” Vemury says.
Eventually, DHS would like to see the multi-finger biometric collection become part of multi-modal biometric devices, Dr. Sharla Rausch, director of the Human Factors Division, tells TR2. Her division’s biometrics program also has an ongoing effort with multi-modal biometrics.
In this case the goal is to develop standards or guidance in order to “develop tools for quality assessments so that they know when they have a good iris or face image,” Vemury says. The outcomes of this effort also include test and evaluation methodologies and algorithms, he says. The customers in this case are the US-VISIT program and also Customs and Border Protection.
“DHS is trying to get to a point where almost third party test labs can certify products to make certain they conform to certain industry standards before DHS acquires them,” he says.
Biometrics are being used increasingly by U.S. military forces, particularly in overseas war theaters, to identify and capture insurgents and terrorists during field operations, and also to better secure bases. The largest use of biometrics at DHS is within the US-VISIT program which includes the IDENT database of fingerprints used to verify the identity of foreign nationals visiting the U.S. and to run checks against illegal aliens entering the country as possible repeat offenders or wanted criminals.
The main requirements for biometric use in the DHS operating environments are high throughput, greater accuracy because of the large scale databases, the ability to work in a wide range of environments such as deserts, cold winters, maritime and austere, and ruggedness, Rausch and Vemury say.
In stretches of the Northern Border some Border Patrol agents operate on horseback and others go out for days at a time, meaning they can’t be saddled with complicated biometric systems, Vemury says. Moreover, these agents may be operating alone and need a biometric capture device that works quickly, is easy to use and lets them keep one hand free for when they are outnumbered, he says.
DHS also requires collection devices that are highly accurate because of the size of the IDENT database, which numbers over 100 million records. “If you’re off by a little bit, you potentially could be detaining 10,000 more people than you need to or admitting a lot more people than you should be,” Vemury says.
“So when you talk about that scale of operation, accuracy becomes very important, even to the hundredth of a percent,” he says.
Rausch and Vemury say that DHS S&T works closely with DoD on biometrics to leverage work each other does and to maintain awareness of the latest developments. In the contactless fingerprint capture area, S&T originally awarded a contract to Flashscan3D for work related to flat prints. That contract ran out last fall when the Defense Department’s Biometrics Task Force awarded a contract to the company to investigate contactless rolled fingerprint capture.
S&T is working with DoD on Flashscan3D’s contract, Vemury says. “My ultimate objective is to get a multi-finger acquisition system.”
The value of the contactless–which Vemury says is centimeters or inches away from a person’s finger–is improved image quality, including valley and pore detail, and improved anti-spoofing capability.