12 Apr 11. The Lockheed Martin-led Next Generation Identification (NGI) team is beginning to fully develop and deploy a capability that will enhance the FBI’s latent fingerprint matching accuracy and introduce palm print matching to the system. Development efforts began after a successful Critical Design Review (CDR) for the system’s Increment 3. The milestone came just weeks after the FBI declared Initial Operating Capability on NGI’s Increment 1 fingerprint matching capability. “The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is now operational and providing law enforcement officials with more accurate fingerprint identification services than ever before,” said June Shrewsbury, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Citizen Protection Solutions division. “We’re excited to keep up the momentum and begin implementing the system’s latent fingerprint and palm print matching capabilities.” The latent and palm print matching algorithms for the NGI system will be provided by Alexandria, Va.-based MorphoTrak. MorphoTrak also provided the system’s fingerprint matching algorithms.
12 Apr 11. Thales announces aviation security prize winners. Thales t announced that Human Recognition Systems (HRS) have been awarded the first prize in the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism’s (OSCT’s) INSTINCT Technology Demonstrator 2 (TD2) project. The INSTINCT-TD2 project, launched in July 2010, is a government initiative to work with industry to discover, trial and showcase new and innovative technologies, solutions or ideas, specifically around aviation security. It has been led by Thales UK on behalf of the Home Office. HRS’s entry, which provides face and iris recognition while on the move and from distance, was selected as the winning technology by an independent review panel, comprising industry, academia and OSCT, following the results of live trials and the TD2 Showcase event. The TD2 project was focussed on identifying new technologies, systems and ideas to enhance aviation security and the passenger experience, while potentially helping to increase airport revenues. As a result of this competition, Thales has presented HRS with a prize of £30,000 to support them in further developing their innovative technologies to transform them into fully commercial offerings. The second place prize of £15,000 – was awarded to Ipsotek, whose technology provides users with real-time behaviour analysis and detection. ICTS’s managed queuing system finished third with a prize of £5,000. The prize fund was provided by Thales. Each of these technologies performed well against the key competition criteria especially the complementary aspects of increased aviation security and improved passenger experience, which led to them being selected as the winning three companies. During the TD2 project more than 40 technologies were selected for demonstration at the TD2 Showcase event, held at Thales UK’s Crawley site in December 2010. Around 20 of the selected companies also carried out live trials at some of the UK’s busiest airports to show how their technologies could potentially be integrated into the airports of the future.
David Lockwood, head of Thales’s UK defence and security systems business, says: “One of the aims we set out for the TD2 project was to bring to light innovation and concepts from small enterprises and academia that would not normally be seen until much more mature. As a result of very strong competition from hundreds of entrants, the selection panel had a difficult job selecting the winning company.
07 Apr 11. Mobile phone forensics step up on the frontline. The UK’s Royal Military Police (RMP) is to deploy Radio Tactics’ Aceso mobile evidence retrieval systems across its companies in order to rapidly process and exploit data captured from mobile phones at source. While details have yet to be finalised, it is expected that rollout will commence in April and carry through to mid-2011, a company spokesperson told Jane’s. (Sour