By Calvin Biesecker
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system will include a plan for integrating various mature biometric technologies such as palm prints, but will also allow for the inclusion in the future of technologies that currently aren’t mature, Lockheed Martin [LMT] officials said yesterday.
“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,” Barb Humpton, director of the NGI program for Lockheed Martin’s Transportation and Security Solutions business, said on a conference call for media. 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.
The nearer-term technologies that will be included in NGI are expanded fingerprint capabilities, palm prints, facial and iris recognition capabilities. In the coming months the FBI and Lockheed Martin are expected to host competitions between various vendors for the different biometric modalities that will initially be integrated into NGI.
The FBI on Tuesday awarded Lockheed Martin a potential 10-year, $1 billion contract to design, develop, test, and deploy NGI (Defense Daily, Feb. 13). NGI is a follow-on to the FBI’s current fingerprint-based database of criminal and terrorist records, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which Lockheed Martin also developed and deployed. The FBI said that NGI will have its initial operating capability within 30 months and final operating capability within six years of contract award. After that, the focus will be on operating and maintaining the system.
Over the first year of the NGI contract, for which the FBI is awarding nearly $40 million, 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, Judy Marks, president of the Transportation and Security Solutions business, said on the conference call.
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 much 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,” Humpton says.
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.
In its press release Tuesday evening announcing the NGI contract, Lockheed Martin disclosed for the first time its teammates for the program. They include: Accenture [ACN], which will have responsibility for interoperability and change management; 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.