UK publishes tender for police facial recognition

The United Kingdom Home Office has issued a tender for a new national facial recognition software for policing amid increasing use of the technology by the country’s law enforcement agencies.

According to the tender, the contractor will need to provide an application programming interface (API) for facial matching and associated services. The product will be used within the Strategic Facial Matching (SFM) Project to deliver infrastructure, software and data migration for the new national facial matching service.

The tender arrives after UK’s Policing Minister Chris Philp promised to increase the use of live recognition to identify suspects and deter crime. In October 2023, Philp unveiled plans to build a national facial recognition database that integrates facial search capability within the UK’s Police National Database (PND) with the UK Passport Office database. The UK Passport Office holds images of 45 million UK passport holders.

The plan has been met with warnings from rights groups and condemnation from Scottish Biometrics Commissioner Brian Plastow. Despite the criticism, however, UK authorities have continued pushing facial recognition in policing. In April, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the country will spend £55.5 million (US$69.5 million) on the technology over the next four years.

The Strategic Facial Matching (SFM) Project is run by the Home Office Biometrics (HOB) unit.

Home Office Biometrics already runs the Biometrics Services Gateway (BSG) which is used for storing and searching biometric data. The Biometrics Services Gateway contains an API for a mobile fingerprint check service integrated into the mobile platforms and apps of 35 police forces and immigration authorities. The agency’s next step is to extend this into face matching.

“Mobile biometric services could be extended into the modality of face, exploiting the ubiquitous imaging capability now omnipresent in smartphones, together with apps and infrastructure which is already integrated with the BSG,” the document says.

To introduce the project to suppliers and in-house IT departments, the Home Office is organizing an online workshop on July 17th. Applications for the workshop close on July 12th.

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Article Topics

biometric matching  |  Biometric Services Gateway  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  Home Office Biometrics (HOB)  |  police  |  Strategic Facial Matching (SFM) Project  |  tender  |  UK