Innovatrics has expanded its ABIS for Criminal Investigation with two updates aimed less at raw matching accuracy and more at how forensic units actually work: a more flexible approach to latent fingerprint examination, and a video capability designed to turn raw footage into court-admissible evidence inside a single case file. Together they push the company’s criminal justice and law enforcement platform further along the investigative chain, from the moment evidence is collected to the point it is presented in court.
The first update reworks how the system supports ACE-V, the Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification methodology that latent print examiners follow. Rather than imposing a single review model, the update is built to accommodate different agency policies and team structures without forcing examiners to change their established process. Unresolved latent evidence stays active across an investigation instead of being closed out, so a print that cannot be identified today remains in play as new records arrive.
Several specific additions support that flexibility. An Examination View gives each examiner a centralized dashboard of assigned casework, pending items, and next steps across multiple cases, replacing ad hoc tracking. Automated enrollment-to-evidence searches compare newly enrolled suspects or records against the pool of unresolved latents, generating investigative leads without an examiner manually re-running historic evidence. Multi-user workflows with blind verification keep the process aligned with standard forensic practice, in which a second examiner confirms a conclusion without seeing the first examiner’s decision.
The second update, Video Investigation, addresses a different bottleneck: the volume of recorded footage now attached to criminal cases. The feature processes video faster than real time and brings that processing into the investigative workflow rather than relying on separate, disconnected tools. Automatic face detection groups a person’s appearances into tracklets, each representing one individual’s occurrence over time, and those faces can be searched against enrolled galleries and against evidence already attached to a case.
Crucially for prosecutions, the work stays inside one environment with a complete record of how evidence was handled. Investigators can process footage, run facial searches, crop the strongest facial images for the case record, and annotate objects, events, and SMT, the scars, marks, and tattoos long used in identification, all within a unified case file. Processing is parametric and rerunnable, so an analyst can adjust facial score thresholds and candidate limits and repeat a search, with the steps documented. The audit trail is what supports chain-of-custody requirements and, by extension, the admissibility of the resulting evidence in court.
Both updates sit within a single ABIS that combines face, fingerprint, iris, palm print, SMT, and DNA identification alongside case management, rather than a set of standalone matchers. That means keeping analysis, comparison, and documentation in one auditable system so that an investigative lead and the evidence behind it can be traced end to end.
The updates build on a matching engine that has performed strongly in independent testing. Innovatrics has topped NIST latent fingerprint evaluation with a 98.2 percent rank-one hit rate on an FBI dataset, and has halved its error rate in NIST face recognition testing. The company has also upgraded ABIS enrolment alongside a new face SDK, the same enrolment path the latent and video workflows now feed.
For agencies, the practical effect is that latent print examination and video analysis are handled as structured, multi-user, auditable processes inside the criminal ABIS, rather than as separate exercises whose outputs have to be reassembled later for court.
Sources: Innovatrics, Innovatrics
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
