- Email: [email protected]
Daon wins Mexico contract
NEWS ...Continued from front page Editorial Office: Elsevier Ltd The Boulevard Langford Lane Kidlington Oxford OX5 1GB, UK Fax: +44 (0) 1865 843973 Email: [email protected] Website: www.biometrics-today.com Publisher: Laurence Zipson E-mail: [email protected] Editor: Steve Mansfield-Devine Tel: +44 (0) 20 3286 7828 Production Support Manager: Lin Lucas Email: [email protected] Subscription Information An annual subscription to Biometric Technology Today includes 10 printed issues and online access for up to 5 users. Prices: 998 for all European countries & Iran US$1080 for all countries except Europe and Japan ¥132 700 for Japan (Prices valid until 31 December 2010) To subscribe send payment to the address above. Tel: +44 (0)1865 843687/Fax: +44 (0)1865 834971 Email: [email protected], or via www.biometrics-today.com. Subscriptions run for 12 months, from the date payment is received. Periodicals postage is paid at Rahway, NJ 07065, USA. Postmaster send all USA address corrections to: Biometric Technology Today, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001, USA This newsletter and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by Elsevier Ltd, and the following terms and conditions apply to their use: Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier Global Rights Department, PO Box 800, Oxford OX5 1DX, UK; phone: +44 1865 843830, fax: +44 1865 853333, email: [email protected]. You may also contact Global Rights directly through Elsevier’s home page (www.elsevier.com), selecting first ‘Support & contact’, then ‘Copyright & permission’. In the USA, users may clear permissions and make payments through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA; phone: +1 978 750 8400, fax: +1 978 750 4744, and in the UK through the Copyright Licensing Agency Rapid Clearance Service (CLARCS), 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP, UK; phone: +44 (0)20 7631 5555; fax: +44 (0)20 7631 5500. Other countries may have a local reprographic rights agency for payments. Derivative Works Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution. Permission of the Publisher is required for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations. Electronic Storage or Usage Permission of the Publisher is required to store or use electronically any material contained in this journal, including any article or part of an article. Except as outlined above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Publisher. Address permissions requests to: Elsevier Science Global Rights Department, at the mail, fax and email addresses noted above. Notice No responsibility is assumed by the Publisher for any injury and/ or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made. Although all advertising material is expected to conform to ethical (medical) standards, inclusion in this publication does not constitute a guarantee or endorsement of the quality or value of such product or of the claims made of it by its manufacturer.
02265 Pre-press/Printed by Mayfield Press (Oxford) Ltd.
2
Biometric Technology Today
Raytheon led the Trusted Borders consortium that was carrying out the £650m programme. At the close of 2009, a highly critical report from the Home Affairs Committee even questioned whether the e-Borders scheme was legal, saying that it could be in breach of EU regulations that permit movement between member states on production of a valid identity document. There was also criticism from rail and ferry operators. In the wake of the cancellation of the ID card scheme, the UK’s ditching of more advanced biometric passports, and the closing of the ContactPoint child database, much of the ID-related work of the previous Labour Government has now been reversed or is on hold.
industry
L-1 picks up contracts and possibly ends its search for a buyer
L
-1 Identity Solutions has been picking up more contracts, launching new products and announcing halfyear financial results while, in the background, its search for a buyer may be drawing to a close. According to Bloomberg, French defence electronics firm Safran, which already includes biometrics company Morpho in its group, is currently in talks to purchase most of L-1 – all of the business, in fact, except the unit that provides consulting services to US intelligence agencies. L-1 has been investigating potential sales since March. L-1’s share price recently spiked, although its latest financial results were relatively flat. Revenue was $164m in Q2 2010, compared with $168m for the same quarter in 2009. This was partly affected by lower revenues from US Passport Cards, which is expected to pick up later in 2010. The firm reported a net loss of
$2.7m in the quarter, against a loss of $1.2m the previous year. Figures for the first six months of 2010 showed a similar pattern – with revenue of $312m against $318m the previous year. Meanwhile, L-1 has also expanded its HIIDE family of products with a new handheld device capable of creating its own biometric templates and a new middleware system for managing multiple devices and data in the field. The HIIDE 5 is intended for high-volume enrolments in remote locations. A fingerprint sensor provides single- and two-finger flat and roll capture using the only sensor that is FBIapproved for enrolments. The device also offers dual iris capture and a full-function camera for taking facial images. On-board software performs image quality checks. The HIIDE 5 is also equipped with GPS and its wireless capabilities include wifi, Bluetooth, 3G/4G, tactical radio and wimax. With the new middleware from L-1 running on an attached laptop, the HIIDE 5 can also generate biometric templates compatible with back-end systems such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). With templates occupying about a tenth of the storage space of images, this allows the device to store over one million identities. The middleware supports watchlist development, the ability to push data wirelessly out to devices, and easy data sharing between devices and databases. It also offers onboard subject record management encompassing de-duplication and synchronisation between devices and the field laptop, and wireless import/export of subject records. L-1 is also busy developing other technologies. The US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, Human Factors Division has awarded the firm a contract to develop mobile, four-finger slap image capture devices. The aim is to create highly portable biometric capture devices for use in remote locations without supporting infrastructure. L-1 says it has also received a follow-on order for additional licences for its ABIS system from an unnamed US defence agency.
government id
Daon wins Mexico contract
I
The L-1 HIIDE 5 portable enrolment system is capable of generating its own templates.
n addition to its work on the Indian Aadhaar project (see above), Daon has been selected to provide software for the Mexican Government’s SNIP (National Personal Identification
July/August 2010
NEWS Service) programme. The selection was made by the programme’s prime contractor, Unisys. “With a population of 110 million people and incorporating multimodal fusion, the Mexican Government has launched an extremely advanced project,” said Terry Hartmann, VP of identification and credentialing solutions at Unisys. Daon will provide its Commercial Off-TheShelf (COTS) biometrics platform, which includes both centralised and client functions. For the SNIP programme, the Daon software will provide multimodal data fusion, combining iris, finger and face records to maximise accuracy. Daon has also announced that it has signed a Value Added Reseller (VAR) agreement with Diebold in which the latter will resell Daon biometrics and ID management software. Diebold is targeting a number of markets, particularly projects generated by or complying with the US Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12, which sets standards for federal ID programmes.
credentialling
NASA picks Aware workflow platform
N
ASA is the latest customer for Aware’s Biometric Workflow Platform (BWP), which forms a key part of the space agency’s recent credentialling system upgrade, which has made the system compliant with the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) standard. The new system was implemented by ID Networks, which also deployed Aware’s PIVSuite software components for enrolment applications. Using BWP, NASA was able to conduct a biometric enrolment proof-ofconcept in under five weeks, claims Aware, and a fully functional test system able to produce compliant PIV cards was in place in 12 weeks. Another US government agency – as-yet un-named – is also deploying Aware software as part of a PIV-compliant credentialling system implemented by IT services firm Jacob & Sundstrom. The systems in use in this case are Aware’s Biometric Services Platform (BioSP), a web services-based biometrics application server, and its Universal Registration Client (URC). Together they will provide organisation-wide enrolment, as well as centralised data structuring and workflow for issuing employee credentials. In Europe, Aware has supplied its BioSP platform to a large police agency, which Aware claims, is “analogous to the US FBI”. The un-named police agency is using BioSP for a number of centralised biometric applications.
July/August 2010
One workflow application is used to screen and convert incoming digital fingerprint records from external sources, such as Interpol and the FBI, into their domestic format. Fingerprint records that cannot be completely converted automatically are stored, and an Aware software application is used to edit them manually.
mobile security
New smartphone platform from BIO-key
B
IO-key has launched a new biometric ID and authentication platform that encompasses smartphones and other mobile devices, as well as desktop PCs. The move has been driven by the widespread use of smartphones, laptops and tablet devices to access personal and corporate data. “We live in a world with 24x7 access to information from mobile devices,” said Mike DePasquale, CEO of BIO-key International. “Application providers and enterprise IT professionals have been struggling with how they can quickly, conveniently and accurately establish the identity of remote users looking to access their sites and applications. With the anticipated ubiquity of fingerprint-enabled smartphones – such as the LG eXpo, the first such smartphone introduced in the US market – enterprise application providers now have a more secure and convenient alternative to passwords for their remote users to establish their identity.” According to IDC’s ‘Worldwide Mobile Phone Quarterly Tracker’ report, published in May 2010, growth in the smartphone sector more than doubled compared with the overall mobile phone market in the first quarter this year. Vendors shipped 54.7 million units in that period, an increase of 56.7% from the same quarter the year before. In March 2010, a Nielson report predicted that smartphones will become the standard mobile device by the end of 2011, exceeding the number of mobile phones in the US. Many smartphones now incorporate fingerprint readers, mostly from AuthenTec. That company’s president, Larry Ciaccia, claims that over 10 million mobile phones in the US now have the firm’s scanners built in. “Cellphone manufacturers recognise that passwords and PIN codes are not sufficient to secure a user’s personal data or provide secure access to company networks and servers,” he said. In a separate announcement, BIO-key says it saw a 411% increase in revenues in the second quarter of 2010, compared with the same quarter in 2009. Revenues for its Biometrics
NEWS IN BRIEF Clemont Creusot, a graduate student and doctoral fellow at the University of York, is the winner of the UK Biometric Research Competition, sponsored by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and hosted by the University of Kent and the UK Biometrics Institute. His paper, ‘Landmark Labeling for 3-D Faces’, proposed new techniques for automatically finding key points on a face for use in facial recognition systems. The aim of the competition was to promote biometrics research in the UK and encourage co-operation between academia, government and industry. An increased acceptance of biometrics is one of the key findings of a recent survey by the Biometrics Institute. Designed to provide an overview of the state of the biometrics industry in Australia and New Zealand, the survey fond that user acceptance increased significantly in 2009 and remains a key goal for the next five years. Construction firm Carillon is rolling out a biometric workforce solution from Human Recognition Systems (HRS) at all its building sites across the UK. Carillon will implement MSite from HRS at 40-50 sites each year. HRS has also teamed up with Speedy Space to offer MSite as a rental model, with the system housed in Speedy’s anti-vandal cabin and delivered to site ready for use. A number of advertising billboards in Japan are capable of showing ads matched to a passerby’s gender, thanks to facial recognition. Some 27 electronic billboards have been set up by the Digital Signage Promotion Project in subway stations around Tokyo. A camera in each display registers the face of any passerby who looks at the display and determines the person’s gender and approximate age. The system then displays an appropriate ad. No images are stored, but the billboards do collate demographic data. Cross Match Technologies is working with the Indian Government to help register rural residents in Bihar for a national guaranteed employment programme (NREGA). The scheme provides an opportunity for adult members of rural households to obtain 100 days of public workbased employment annually. The implementation and management of the programme is handled by BeST, a joint venture company between Beltron (Bihar State Electronics Development Corporation) and IL&FS. Beltron selected Cross Match’s Guardian applicant Livescan and fingerprint enrolment systems, which are in use throughout remote locations in Bihar. The programme is expected to involve 25 million enrolments, many of which will take place in harsh environmental conditions.
Biometric Technology Today
3
02265 Pre-press/Printed by Mayfield Press (Oxford) Ltd.
2
Biometric Technology Today
Raytheon led the Trusted Borders consortium that was carrying out the £650m programme. At the close of 2009, a highly critical report from the Home Affairs Committee even questioned whether the e-Borders scheme was legal, saying that it could be in breach of EU regulations that permit movement between member states on production of a valid identity document. There was also criticism from rail and ferry operators. In the wake of the cancellation of the ID card scheme, the UK’s ditching of more advanced biometric passports, and the closing of the ContactPoint child database, much of the ID-related work of the previous Labour Government has now been reversed or is on hold.
industry
L-1 picks up contracts and possibly ends its search for a buyer
L
-1 Identity Solutions has been picking up more contracts, launching new products and announcing halfyear financial results while, in the background, its search for a buyer may be drawing to a close. According to Bloomberg, French defence electronics firm Safran, which already includes biometrics company Morpho in its group, is currently in talks to purchase most of L-1 – all of the business, in fact, except the unit that provides consulting services to US intelligence agencies. L-1 has been investigating potential sales since March. L-1’s share price recently spiked, although its latest financial results were relatively flat. Revenue was $164m in Q2 2010, compared with $168m for the same quarter in 2009. This was partly affected by lower revenues from US Passport Cards, which is expected to pick up later in 2010. The firm reported a net loss of
$2.7m in the quarter, against a loss of $1.2m the previous year. Figures for the first six months of 2010 showed a similar pattern – with revenue of $312m against $318m the previous year. Meanwhile, L-1 has also expanded its HIIDE family of products with a new handheld device capable of creating its own biometric templates and a new middleware system for managing multiple devices and data in the field. The HIIDE 5 is intended for high-volume enrolments in remote locations. A fingerprint sensor provides single- and two-finger flat and roll capture using the only sensor that is FBIapproved for enrolments. The device also offers dual iris capture and a full-function camera for taking facial images. On-board software performs image quality checks. The HIIDE 5 is also equipped with GPS and its wireless capabilities include wifi, Bluetooth, 3G/4G, tactical radio and wimax. With the new middleware from L-1 running on an attached laptop, the HIIDE 5 can also generate biometric templates compatible with back-end systems such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). With templates occupying about a tenth of the storage space of images, this allows the device to store over one million identities. The middleware supports watchlist development, the ability to push data wirelessly out to devices, and easy data sharing between devices and databases. It also offers onboard subject record management encompassing de-duplication and synchronisation between devices and the field laptop, and wireless import/export of subject records. L-1 is also busy developing other technologies. The US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, Human Factors Division has awarded the firm a contract to develop mobile, four-finger slap image capture devices. The aim is to create highly portable biometric capture devices for use in remote locations without supporting infrastructure. L-1 says it has also received a follow-on order for additional licences for its ABIS system from an unnamed US defence agency.
government id
Daon wins Mexico contract
I
The L-1 HIIDE 5 portable enrolment system is capable of generating its own templates.
n addition to its work on the Indian Aadhaar project (see above), Daon has been selected to provide software for the Mexican Government’s SNIP (National Personal Identification
July/August 2010
NEWS Service) programme. The selection was made by the programme’s prime contractor, Unisys. “With a population of 110 million people and incorporating multimodal fusion, the Mexican Government has launched an extremely advanced project,” said Terry Hartmann, VP of identification and credentialing solutions at Unisys. Daon will provide its Commercial Off-TheShelf (COTS) biometrics platform, which includes both centralised and client functions. For the SNIP programme, the Daon software will provide multimodal data fusion, combining iris, finger and face records to maximise accuracy. Daon has also announced that it has signed a Value Added Reseller (VAR) agreement with Diebold in which the latter will resell Daon biometrics and ID management software. Diebold is targeting a number of markets, particularly projects generated by or complying with the US Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12, which sets standards for federal ID programmes.
credentialling
NASA picks Aware workflow platform
N
ASA is the latest customer for Aware’s Biometric Workflow Platform (BWP), which forms a key part of the space agency’s recent credentialling system upgrade, which has made the system compliant with the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) standard. The new system was implemented by ID Networks, which also deployed Aware’s PIVSuite software components for enrolment applications. Using BWP, NASA was able to conduct a biometric enrolment proof-ofconcept in under five weeks, claims Aware, and a fully functional test system able to produce compliant PIV cards was in place in 12 weeks. Another US government agency – as-yet un-named – is also deploying Aware software as part of a PIV-compliant credentialling system implemented by IT services firm Jacob & Sundstrom. The systems in use in this case are Aware’s Biometric Services Platform (BioSP), a web services-based biometrics application server, and its Universal Registration Client (URC). Together they will provide organisation-wide enrolment, as well as centralised data structuring and workflow for issuing employee credentials. In Europe, Aware has supplied its BioSP platform to a large police agency, which Aware claims, is “analogous to the US FBI”. The un-named police agency is using BioSP for a number of centralised biometric applications.
July/August 2010
One workflow application is used to screen and convert incoming digital fingerprint records from external sources, such as Interpol and the FBI, into their domestic format. Fingerprint records that cannot be completely converted automatically are stored, and an Aware software application is used to edit them manually.
mobile security
New smartphone platform from BIO-key
B
IO-key has launched a new biometric ID and authentication platform that encompasses smartphones and other mobile devices, as well as desktop PCs. The move has been driven by the widespread use of smartphones, laptops and tablet devices to access personal and corporate data. “We live in a world with 24x7 access to information from mobile devices,” said Mike DePasquale, CEO of BIO-key International. “Application providers and enterprise IT professionals have been struggling with how they can quickly, conveniently and accurately establish the identity of remote users looking to access their sites and applications. With the anticipated ubiquity of fingerprint-enabled smartphones – such as the LG eXpo, the first such smartphone introduced in the US market – enterprise application providers now have a more secure and convenient alternative to passwords for their remote users to establish their identity.” According to IDC’s ‘Worldwide Mobile Phone Quarterly Tracker’ report, published in May 2010, growth in the smartphone sector more than doubled compared with the overall mobile phone market in the first quarter this year. Vendors shipped 54.7 million units in that period, an increase of 56.7% from the same quarter the year before. In March 2010, a Nielson report predicted that smartphones will become the standard mobile device by the end of 2011, exceeding the number of mobile phones in the US. Many smartphones now incorporate fingerprint readers, mostly from AuthenTec. That company’s president, Larry Ciaccia, claims that over 10 million mobile phones in the US now have the firm’s scanners built in. “Cellphone manufacturers recognise that passwords and PIN codes are not sufficient to secure a user’s personal data or provide secure access to company networks and servers,” he said. In a separate announcement, BIO-key says it saw a 411% increase in revenues in the second quarter of 2010, compared with the same quarter in 2009. Revenues for its Biometrics
NEWS IN BRIEF Clemont Creusot, a graduate student and doctoral fellow at the University of York, is the winner of the UK Biometric Research Competition, sponsored by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and hosted by the University of Kent and the UK Biometrics Institute. His paper, ‘Landmark Labeling for 3-D Faces’, proposed new techniques for automatically finding key points on a face for use in facial recognition systems. The aim of the competition was to promote biometrics research in the UK and encourage co-operation between academia, government and industry. An increased acceptance of biometrics is one of the key findings of a recent survey by the Biometrics Institute. Designed to provide an overview of the state of the biometrics industry in Australia and New Zealand, the survey fond that user acceptance increased significantly in 2009 and remains a key goal for the next five years. Construction firm Carillon is rolling out a biometric workforce solution from Human Recognition Systems (HRS) at all its building sites across the UK. Carillon will implement MSite from HRS at 40-50 sites each year. HRS has also teamed up with Speedy Space to offer MSite as a rental model, with the system housed in Speedy’s anti-vandal cabin and delivered to site ready for use. A number of advertising billboards in Japan are capable of showing ads matched to a passerby’s gender, thanks to facial recognition. Some 27 electronic billboards have been set up by the Digital Signage Promotion Project in subway stations around Tokyo. A camera in each display registers the face of any passerby who looks at the display and determines the person’s gender and approximate age. The system then displays an appropriate ad. No images are stored, but the billboards do collate demographic data. Cross Match Technologies is working with the Indian Government to help register rural residents in Bihar for a national guaranteed employment programme (NREGA). The scheme provides an opportunity for adult members of rural households to obtain 100 days of public workbased employment annually. The implementation and management of the programme is handled by BeST, a joint venture company between Beltron (Bihar State Electronics Development Corporation) and IL&FS. Beltron selected Cross Match’s Guardian applicant Livescan and fingerprint enrolment systems, which are in use throughout remote locations in Bihar. The programme is expected to involve 25 million enrolments, many of which will take place in harsh environmental conditions.
Biometric Technology Today
3