WIN using NEC’s biometric technology in cold case investigations

NEC Corporation of America (NEC) announced the results of its Integra ID 5 latent fingerprint matching technologies as measured in actual use by WIN (Western Identification Network), a consortium of western U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies.

Following 18 months of successful operation of the WIN Integra ID solution, all eight member states are reporting measurably elevated latent fingerprint and palm print hit rates and that more than 2,000 cold latent (prints that are partial prints) have been verified to have a #1 matching respondent resulting in leads in multiple criminal cases including homicides and aggravated assaults.

NEC helped WIN save countless hours in investigative manpower by implementing an automated process to search unsolved latent cases and present the results for verification. NEC’s fusion of multiple feature encoding and matching algorithms, uniquely incorporated in Integra ID 5, is instrumental in achieving these results and, according to NEC, even the poorest quality prints are consistently returned as the #1 hit respondent.

“WIN is pleased with the performance of the NEC Integra ID 5 solution,” said Ken Bischoff, CEO of WIN. “The care placed in back record conversion of more than 15 million WIN records to the new NEC algorithms and Integra ID 5 platform are paying dividends.”

Kathy Monfreda, acting director of the Alaska DPS (Department of Public Safety), Division of Statewide Identification Technology Support, highlighted the significance of this effort: “Through WIN’s significant diligence in selecting proven and accurate fingerprint matching technology, our expectations were high. Still, there is no denying the value of forward searching previously searched latent prints. The subsequent match results are impressive for all WIN states.”

“We are so pleased to see the real world successes of our Integra ID 5 platform.” said Raffie Beroukhim, vice president of NEC’s Biometrics Solutions Division. “NEC has unequivocal commitment to our users and the entire law enforcement community to continue to drive our core feature extraction, search algorithms and platform to provide the highest in fingerprint and palm print accuracy. The successes experienced in WIN are a demonstration of this continued commitment.”

The NEC solution is part of NEC’s “Building Safer Cities” platform, a concept that supports the growing safety and security vision to merge the traditional law enforcement areas of biometric-based identity management and forensic investigation with video surveillance, security access control, and disaster management.

Article Topics

Alaska  |  biometrics  |  fingerprint technology  |  latent fingerprints  |  law enforcement  |  NEC  |  NEC America  |  palm prints  |  Western Identification Network