The State Department has chosen
Identix Inc. to provide facial-recognition software to
be integrated into visa application processes. The
Minnetonka, Minn., company said the contract is worth
more than $2.2 million over the next 12 months from the
initial options State has exercised by choosing it as
the sole recipient of the Facial Recognition System and
Integration Support contract.
The contract has one base year and four one-year
options. It calls for Identix to provide its biometric
discovery engine known as the Automated Biometric
Identification System 3.0 in what the company calls the
largest deployment of facial-recognition technology in
the world to date.
Identix said it would immediately begin to supply,
integrate and deploy ABIS. State will use the system for
three purposes:
- Detecting visa applicant fraud via one-to-many
matching of submitted photos with those already in
the department's database
- Verifying the identity of applicants for visa
renewal by one-to-one matching of submitted photos
with corresponding pictures in the database
- Detecting wanted or missing persons by one-to-many
matching of submitted photos against terrorist watch
list images
Identix will carry out several tasks, including
enrolling about 35 million existing visa photos; adding
about eight million new images annually from regular
visa applicants; entering at least 10 million visa
lottery applicants' photos annually; matching images
against additional pictures State will provide; and
processing up to 2,000 matches per hour.
International Biometric Group of New York and Science
Applications International Corp. of San Diego also will
work on the contract team.
Large versions of ABIS are made up of three components:
a search core server that handles biometric tasks, an
Oracle9i database management system and an application
server that links ABIS to other applications. The search
core typically runs on a Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003
platform using dual Intel Xeon processors, according to
the company. The Oracle database can hold up to 100
million facial templates.
Viisage Technology Inc. of Billerica, Mass., and
Cognitec Systems GmbH of Dresden, Germany, two other
vendors of facial-recognition software, also
participated in teams bidding on the contract, Identix
said.
