DHS Announces Third Biometric Technology Rally

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate has announced that it is calling for submissions for its third Biometric Technology Rally (Rally).

The Rally program, started in 2018, challenges players in the industry to provide fast, accurate and easy-to-use biometric recognition technology with the aim of improving security and checkpoint processing.

The 2020 Rally will be focusing on the challenges of reliably identifying small, free-flowing groups in crowded environments like airports and other ports of entry, while building on more high-throughput biometric technologies developed over the past two years.

The DHS is calling on submissions for the 2020 Rally, which is to be held at the Maryland Test Facility in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, in the fall of this year.

Testing for the Rally will take place in controlled scenarios that are relevant to DHS operations, and officials are encouraging providers of biometric acquisition systems and matching algorithms to participate.

“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,” said Arun Vemury, Director of DHS S&T’s Biometric and Identity Technology Center.

“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,” he added.

The 2020 Rally will consist of individual and group-processing phases, with participants requiring strong performances in the former to qualify for the latter.

Participants that qualify for the group phase will also participate in a Stakeholder Demonstration Day that will allow them to showcase their technologies to government and private sector stakeholders.

The results of the 2020 Rally will be used by DHS to inform future planning activities and guide researchers in the development of next-gen capabilities.

Interested participants must submit their applications no later than April 30, 2020, in order to take part in the Rally.

Source: Homeland Security Today

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March 3, 2020 – by Tony Bitzionis