Page 160 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

CHAPTER 7

BUYING AN AFIS SYSTEM: THE
BASIC DOCUMENTS NEEDED

Peter T. Higgins and Kathleen M. Higgins
The Higgins-Hermansen Group, LLC

7.1 INTRODUCTION
Purchasing an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) can be a
daunting task. It is a huge undertaking that can typically cost millions of dollars
and years of staff time and effort. Each of the vendors you have considered has
probably promised that their system is the very best—it will do everything that
the police, the forensic team or the civil agency, and the public need it to do,
and their system is faster and better than the other vendors’ offerings. Plus,
your colleagues likely have systems from different vendors and have strongly
held views on their experiences.
Selecting the AFIS that is best suited for a specific community is dependent
on a number of different steps and involves a great number of individuals within
the community, many of whom (e.g., a state’s network manager) will never use
the system or even care how it functions, as a biometric system, once it is
installed. Getting the cooperation and input from each of these individuals at
the earliest stages of the project and maintaining their cooperation through-
out the design, development, implementation, and testing phases is critical to
the project’s success.

7.2 THE NEED FOR A DISCIPLINED APPROACH

An AFIS provides an automated way to search fingerprints, latent images, and
palm prints. While all AFIS employ standard computer hardware, and some
employ special purpose accelerator boards, the soul of these machines is soft-
ware that contains the algorithms and other mathematical magic. The major
AFIS vendors all offer a core commercial product that is normally modified or
augmented as part of a procurement to reflect the interfaces and business rules
of the customer, be it a criminal justice or civil agency. The basic foundation
of hardware and software is typically referred to as a commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS) system. The integration of COTS systems with customer networks and
business rules is part of the discipline of software engineering.