The Latent Accuracy “Derby” and Spring Showers of Announcements
It’s springtime, which means Kentucky Derby time for horse racing fans! And NIST is bringing a new 2024 crop of latent test results to the continuously running “Latent Accuracy Derby.”
The past 10 years have seen dramatic improvements in biometric accuracy. Latents have demonstrated the strongest improvements, partly validated by competitive testing and published results. Biometrics industry progress rests not on pedigree but on advances in machine learning, AI, big data, etc.
The latest NIST ELFT results are just one facet of the challenge of biometrics success. Each customer’s data, infrastructure, latent quality, examiner’s interpretation, and available biometric tools contribute significantly to key system performance measures such as speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Nevertheless, the latest NIST results are a closely watched part of the action.
The companies involved in this latest “latent horse race” include some very familiar pedigrees (Idemia, NEC, Thales), along with some less well known entries (Dermalog, Innovatrics, Hisign, Rank One Computing, Neurotechnology, Griaule, and ALB/Peking University). NIST’s ELFT test against the FBI Dataset was a photo finish with Idemia by a nose over Hisign. Thales and Innovatrics continued to contend for the lead. Who knows what the next NIST test will bring? It’s always an exciting race!
Spring season has also brought showers of announcements from biometrics providers, including:
Idemia is promoting its continuing NIST ELFT leadership, and its livescan technology success.
Thales continues to promote its Evidence and Investigation Suite (TEIS) which combines portable finger and palm prints, face, and iris biometric capture, workflow and matching with software tools for evidence enhancement and analysis. They bring forensic capabilities to the field via officers’ mobile phones.
Innovatrics announced its ABIS 9.0 upgrade with updated minutiae extraction and an advanced tenprint algorithm, including iris recognition and DNA processing capabilities.
Rank One Computing recently rebranded itself as ROC, emphasizing its “100% made in America” capabilities, recent partnerships with US universities, and the US Department of Defense and public safety clients, as well as its high score in recent NIST tests on latent accuracy.
Neurotechnology of Lithuania released MegaMatcher 13.1, which added voice biometrics and an enhanced face matching algorithm, along with the capability to search across multiple biometric modalities.
NEC is now delivering NeoFace Reveal 5, with advanced image enhancement and review tools as well as the ability to refine poor image quality to improve matching results, designed for public safety implementations and cloud deployment.
