For Immediate Release
DHS S&T Press Office, (202) 254-2296
Washington – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is initiating a series of Biometric Technology Rallies to support industry innovation and advance technologies that support DHS and Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE) operations. The results of these rallies will be used by DHS to inform planning activities, shared with industry participants to improve product capabilities, and shared with researchers to enable the development of next-generation capabilities.
The first Biometric Technology Rally in the series will be held in March 2018 at the Maryland Test Facility in Upper Marlboro, MD, and will evaluate face and iris biometric acquisition systems. The rally will challenge industry to provide biometric systems to meet the requirements of high-throughput recognition of users within identity verification operations, and will employ controlled testing of candidate technologies in relevant scenarios.
“Recent improvements in biometric matching technology have greatly reduced biometric matching error rates; however many systems still fail to quickly and reliably acquire biometric information in the first place,” said Arun Vemury, DHS S&T program manager for the agency’s Borders and Maritime Security Division and lead of the S&T Biometric Technology Engine. “This event aims to further reduce the failure rate by challenging industry to develop more intuitive, faster, and more reliable face and iris collection systems.”
The Biometric Technology Rallies were developed in conjunction with the initiation of the DHS S&T Biometric Technology Engine (BT-E) in 2017, as a method of rapidly screening emerging biometric technologies to facilitate operational insertion. The BT-E acts as a knowledge base for data related to biometric technologies examined by DHS S&T with the goal of informing future large-scale acquisitions and sharing this data within DHS, across other agencies, and the HSE.
To be considered for participation, a white paper and video demonstrating system functionality must be submitted no later than December 8, 2017. Participants will be notified of their selection on December 18, 2017, and data collection will take place in March, 2018. Interested parties can sign up to learn more about this and future events, which will focus on other biometric modalities, on the Biometric Technology Rally website.
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