MorphoTrak, a division of Morpho (Safran), recently celebrated its 40th anniversary as the company that pioneered the Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS), which began to arise in the mid-’70s.
It was the FBI that originally wanted the technology developed – an indication of the persistent trend of government need driving private sector biometric development – and in 1974 Rockwell Autonetics completed the first-ever AFIS components for the Bureau. The team responsible spun off into their own company, Rockwell Printrak, which Motorola bought in the year 2000 and then sold to Sagem Morpho in 2009, when the company became MorphoTrak.
And MorphoTrak is still at it. It recently provided the FBI with its Next Generation Identification program, which can scan all of a hand’s “Major Case Prints”; and its MorphoBIS platform is widely used by law enforcement agencies across the US. Biometric technology is increasingly being adopted by government security agencies even at the local level, and globally there’s growing demand for biometric tech for security purposes. It won’t be a surprise, therefore, to see MorphoTrak celebrating many more anniversaries in the future.
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December 9, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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