GLOBAL’s biometrics colleagues are developing advanced ‘big data’ capabilities to aid criminal investigation and counter-terrorism. Sciometrics President Mark Walch explains.

Fingerprints are amongst the best measures of human identity available – truly the “human barcode”. They are similar to DNA as biometric identifiers because they can be obtained either directly from individuals or from things they’ve touched or places they’ve been.

However, fingerprint analysis, often critical to successful law enforcement and counter terrorism operations, is labour intensive, with large sources of data either uncollected or unusable. There is a ‘big data’ need for automated tools capable of collecting and analysing all available hand-related data from multiple sources.

Sciometrics has risen to that challenge with cutting edge capabilities that “raise the bar” in biometrics by enabling accurate data capture ‘on-the-move’, and by boosting data processing and matching. Our approach involves treating the fingerprints as barcodes.

AFISleuth and the AFIS Afterburner are software solutions that broaden the scope of latent fingerprint identification. Latent fingerprints are marks of oils and amino acids deposited by fingers on objects they touch. Consequently, they are notoriously difficult to analyse, much more so than marks scanned directly from the fingers.

These technologies work in two modalities: firstly, investigative – that is processing latent fingerprints captured at a crime scene or other sensitive sites against a database of suspects; and secondly as an “afterburner” to vastly improve the ability to make positive identifications from low quality prints and print fragments.

Taken together, our capabilities enable significant advances in criminal investigations and counter-terrorism operations, particularly when there are large volumes of data to be analysed. Critically, they allow all that previously uncollected or unreadable data to be used, significantly improving the chances of identifying, arresting and prosecuting suspects. This proven approach is already hard at work supporting US federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

In developing such techniques, Sciometrics is applying expertise built up over ten years of developing object recognition and pattern matching technology.

Through our active R&D programme, we work at the cutting edge of object recognition to strengthen the fight against crime and terrorism. For instance, we are currently developing language independent voice recognition and face recognition technologies that utilise the unique features provided in video – vital, automated capabilities that could greatly improve the ability to identify individuals amongst hours of video recordings.

It’s with innovations such as these that Sciometrics continues to play a key role supporting intelligence and law enforcement communities globally.

Mark Walch is President of Sciometrics LLC, partnered with GLOBAL in biometric data capture and analysis.  Mark is the company’s principal architect of innovative ways to streamline how people review big data. Mark has authored numerous scientific papers on data capture and biometrics, and is the inventor of eight (8) U.S. patents and numerous foreign patents in his field.