The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced its third Biometric Technology Rally this week, allowing submitters to show off improved biometric recognition capabilities.
Those capabilities could improve security and use of checkpoint processing, or at least, that’s the hope at S&T. This year, though, the Rally will focus on a technical challenge: plucking small, free-flowing groups of individuals out of a crowd for identification purposes, as in airports or ports of entry.
“Past rallies were limited to testing technologies using individuals one at a time to help industry identify and address the challenges of processing people in high-throughput use cases,” Arun Vemury, director of S&T’s Biometric and Identity Technology Center, said. “Now it’s time to take the training wheels off and see how well these systems deal with more realistic conditions—identifying groups of people that opt-in to using the system while avoiding bystanders in a crowded environment who have not opted-in. We believe that this structured scenario will challenge the biometrics industry to continuously innovate for the benefit of travelers and DHS stakeholders.”
S&T is taking submissions from providers of biometric matching algorithms, along with face and multi-modal biometric acquisition systems, through April 30. Participants will gather in Maryland in the fall for testing on controlled scenarios. Those tests will be split into two parts: an initial individual processing phase and an advanced group-processing phase. To qualify for the latter, one must first deliver a strong performance in the individual round.
In the group processing phase, participants will show off their creations to government and private sector stakeholders, like DHS, the Department of Defense, or the aviation industry. Results from the rally will inform future DHS planning activities, provide feedback to participants, and guide further research.