Aware brings “The Open ABIS” to IAI Conference

Aware is presenting its new automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to the law enforcement community at the IAI International Educational Conference this week with the expectation of new partnerships during fiscal 2019. The company calls AwareABIS “The Open ABIS,” due to its flexibility, which it gets from running on Aware’s BioSP (Biometric Services Platform).

The capabilities proven by the company’s market-leading BioSP make up the core of AwareABIS, Aware VP of Marketing and Product David Benini told Biometric Update in an interview. These capabilities include its modular architecture, rich web services, easily configured workflows, unlimited data access, and support for the user’s choice of algorithms. BioSP is used by the U.S. Department of Defense, UK government agencies, and other large organizations around the world to integrate disparate biometric systems, among other applications.

Building on BioSP’s core functionality, AwareABIS offers a full suite of features for criminal investigation applications, and integrates Aware’s NIST-tested Nexa algorithms, or algorithms from third-party providers. AwareABIS is designed to enable government agencies to run large-scale biometric identification and deduplication projects, with fingerprint, face, iris, or a combination of modalities.

What makes a good ABIS?

There are a number of ABIS offerings on the market, but as technology evolves, the standards they are judged by and their key differentiators change.

Government ID and law enforcement agencies need to judge an ABIS on biometric performance. Matching accuracy must meet the necessary standards, and speed must be sufficient to deliver timely results and run on as few servers as possible.

“More and more, though, agencies around the world are finding that that biometric performance is only a part of the capability they need,” Benini explains. “An ABIS should be extensible, able to evolve to accommodate future functionality needs, integrations, and technology advances.”

In addition to meeting future needs and allowing for expansion, placing greater weight on systems that are flexible is also related to the common problem of vendor lock-in. The data format or system architecture of some ABIS products prevents the customer from using multiple vendors, or switching from one provider to another without losing the existing database.

Tools customers may require in an ABIS include latent fingerprint analysis, face analysis, and automated reporting capabilities.

Aware at IAI

Identification experts from across the law enforcement community are gathering at this week’s 104th IAI (International Association for Identification) International Educational Conference, August 11 to 17 in Reno, Nevada, and Aware is taking the opportunity to engage with the community as a sponsor. IAI is a massive conference of forensic evidence and crime scene processing professionals, and enables the company to communicate directly with ABIS users and agency decision-makers, as well as showcase its new AwareABIS.

“It’s the preeminent event for the forensics community, including fingerprint and facial identification,” Benini says. “The IAI International Educational Conference is a great opportunity to show AwareABIS to the people who will use it, but also for us to continue learning from them.”

Benini is confident that law enforcement officials will recognize the benefit of some of AwareABIS’ capabilities, such as the cluster computing platform Astra, which enables fast, scalable, and reliable system performance with searches even against databases with tens of millions of records.

FingerprintWorkbench

The AwareABIS workstation applications are designed to make the job of forensic analysts easier, according to Benini, with support for a complete range of intuitive workflows, including print registration, queue management, latent match charting and decision verification, along with all of the tools examiners need for efficient and effective task performance, for controlling brightness, contrast, and gamma correction, and running frequency analysis.

FingerprintWorkbench enables latent fingerprint examination, and enables review of tenprints and palm prints, along with report publication. Latent prints can be compared to other latents, tenprints, or palms, and tenprints can be compared to each other or latent prints.

FaceWorkbench

The AwareABIS client application for the face modality, FaceWorkBench, likewise enables a range of workflows, including searches of single or bulk submissions, and integrated training operations.

Benini says the market-leading solution takes in guidelines and best practices Aware has picked up in recent work with the U.S. government, international standards bodies, and independent forensics associations, including FISWG (Facial Identification Scientific Working Group) best practices.

FaceWorkbench also features a rich set of analysis tools including image overlay, blending, splitting and stacking. Reports are automatically generated to document the steps and best practices used and present them clearly for use in legal procedures.

Aware has already built a reputation and relationships with a significant number of agencies from governments around the world. By building the company’s core technologies into a complete, flexible ABIS with advanced features and the innovative Workbench applications, Benini says Aware is perfectly positioned to stand out at the IAI event, and deliver its leading biometric technologies to the law enforcement community.

Article Topics

ABIS  |  Aware  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  fingerprint recognition  |  forensics  |  identification  |  iris recognition  |  multimodal  |  police