DHS S&T to host series of biometric technology rallies

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is hosting a series of Biometric Technology Rallies aimed at supporting industry innovation and advance technologies that assist DHS and Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE) operations.

DHS will use the results of these rallies to inform planning activities by sharing the information with industry participants to improve product capabilities, as well as with researchers to enable the development of next-generation capabilities.

The first Biometric Technology Rally will be held in March 2018 at the Maryland Test Facility in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and will evaluate face and iris biometric acquisition systems.

The rally will call on the industry to provide biometric systems to meet the requirements of high-throughput recognition of users within identity verification operations, and will use controlled testing of candidate technologies in relevant scenarios.

“Recent improvements in biometric matching technology have greatly reduced biometric matching error rates; however many systems still fail to quickly and reliably acquire biometric information in the first place,” said Arun Vemury, DHS S&T program manager for the agency’s Borders and Maritime Security Division and lead of the S&T Biometric Technology Engine. “This event aims to further reduce the failure rate by challenging industry to develop more intuitive, faster, and more reliable face and iris collection systems.”

The Biometric Technology Rallies were developed in collaboration with the initiation of the DHS S&T Biometric Technology Engine (BT-E), earlier this year, as a method of rapidly screening emerging biometric technologies to facilitate operational insertion.

Serving as a knowledge base for data related to biometric technologies examined by DHS S&T, the BT-E is designed to inform future large-scale acquisitions and share the data within DHS, across other agencies, and the HSE.

In order to qualify for participation, applicants must submit a white paper and video displaying system functionality no later than December 8, 2017.

Participants will then be notified of their selection on December 18, 2017, with data collection to begin in March, 2018.

All interested parties can register to learn more about this and future events, which will focus on other biometric modalities, on the Biometric Technology Rally website.

Previously reported, the S&T partnered with the TSA to evaluate new identity verification technology that can speed up the processing time for travelers to pass through security.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  DHS  |  homeland security  |  identity verification  |  research and development