By Calvin Biesecker
The FBI yesterday selected Lockheed Martin [LMT] as the systems integrator for an award potentially worth nearly $1 billion to design, develop and deploy its Next Generation Identification (NGI) System, which will expand its current electronic fingerprint-based database to include multiple biometrics to better improve the identification and capture of criminals and terrorists.
The initial value of the contract, which includes a base year and nine option years, is nearly $40 million for the first year and approaches $1 billion if all options are exercised.
The award to Lockheed Martin wasn’t a surprise given that the company began development of the FBI’s current fingerprint-based electronic database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, 10 years ago. Lockheed Martin beat Northrop Grumman [NOC] and IBM [IBM] for the latest award. However, late in 2006 Northrop Grumman upset Lockheed Martin to develop the next-generation of the Defense Department’s biometric database, the Automated Biometric Identification System, giving that company some momentum heading into the NGI competition (Defense Daily, Jan. 23, 2007). Lockheed Martin was the incumbent on ABIS.
For Lockheed Martin the win keeps a “flagship” customer in biometrics and gives it the opportunity to expand their business with the FBI, Stanford Group analyst Jeremy Grant wrote in a research note yesterday. Grant first reported the win yesterday well before the FBI announced it.
Still to come late this year are additional announcements from the FBI for specific biometric components that Lockheed Martin will integrate into NGI. Grant said that the FBI and Lockheed Martin will conduct a “biometric bakeoff” in the coming weeks to select which technologies will be included in NGI.
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), told Defense Daily. CJIS is responsible for managing IAFIS and NGI.
Stanford Group’s Grant 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. All four companies routinely compete against each other to provide government’s and law enforcement agencies software that enables accurate and rapid matching of fingerprints to biometric databases.
Selection of a provider for fingerprint matching software is about six months away, Jerry Pinder, the deputy director of CJIS, told Defense Daily.
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 (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2007). For iris recognition L-1 again is the favorite and is likely to go up against Cross Match Technologies and Retica. However, Grant 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 their software to manage the multiple biometrics.
Pinder said that biometric fusion capabilities will be the last thing the FBI and Lockheed Martin examine to be part of NGI.
In light of ongoing issues associated with identity theft, lost and stolen documents, and the ability to spoof standard name-based identity management systems, and the national focus on combatting terrorism, the FBI said that NGI will “provide the framework for a future multi-modal system which will facilitate biometric fusion identification techniques. This framework will be expandable, scalable, and flexible to accommodate new technologies and emerging biometric standards, and will be interoperable with existing biometric systems.”
In addition to its multi-modal biometric features, NGI will also enhance fingerprint and latent print processing services, and increase system availability, accuracy and capacity.
NGI will be “bigger, better, faster,” Bush said. IAFIS was originally designed to process about 62,000 searches a day and now does 130,000, he said.