Page 52 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

HISTOR Y OF AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS 37

up in 1977 with a recommendation that latent print examiners be certified by
the IAI. The IAI Latent Print Certification remains one of the most widely
respected standards of peer professional recognition.
A report written in 1974 by Project Search, the forerunner of SEARCH, The
National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, described early
efforts at encoding and searching latent prints. Entitled “An Analysis of
Automated and Semi-Automated System for Encoding and Searching Latent
Fingerprints,” the report contained an appendix that described the results of
testing an automated fingerprint matcher program applied to latent finger-
prints. This test was designed by Richard Higgins and Frank Madrazo of the
New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to explore the feasibility of
an automated fingerprint processing system. The team created an Algol
program based on work by J. H. Wegstein of the National Bureau of Standards,
the forerunner of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Higgins and Madrazo plotted minutiae location, ridge direction angles,
and pattern type on 94 latent print images and searched against a base file
containing 2,526 inked impressions. Following the test, they draw three
conclusions:

1. It worked.
2. More memory and faster speed are required in the computers.
3. Minutiae placement has to be improved.

This was another step in the development of AFIS.

2.5 THE FIRST AFIS SYSTEM

The question of who implemented the first AFIS system is not an easy one to
answer, although there are generally accepted milestones along the path of
AFIS development. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System does just
that—it automates the identification process through the use of computers, or
more characteristically, through digital images that can be coded and searched.
There are several dates in the development of the automated fingerprint
identification process that can be considered the “start” date. Some might con-
sider it to be the first day that a meeting was held to discuss the feasibility of
implementing an AFIS. Others might think the start date to be the date of the
first request for proposal. The date the first contract was signed, the day the
first system became operational, the date the first system was accepted as com-
plete from the vendor: all are legitimate start dates.
In the determination of AFIS “firsts,” it can be noted that not all AFIS systems
are connected to a CCH file; some only match tenprint records against the AFIS