ROC Posts Fastest Latent Fingerprint Search in NIST Evaluation

American biometrics firm ROC has recorded the fastest latent fingerprint search speed in the US government’s benchmark evaluation of the technology, alongside several top accuracy results on datasets used by the FBI and the Department of Defense.

The results come from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Evaluation of Latent Fingerprint Technologies (ELFT), an independent test that measures how well algorithms match the distorted or partial prints recovered from crime scenes against large identity databases. Latent print matching is among the hardest problems in biometrics precisely because the evidence is incomplete, which makes both speed and accuracy difficult to achieve at once. ROC, formally Rank One Computing and listed on Nasdaq as ROC, was evaluated against 22 vendors.

On speed, the company says its algorithm searched roughly 64 times faster than the mean of the top five vendors across the FBI and DoD investigative datasets, while holding top-tier accuracy on the False Negative Identification Rate at Rank-1, the share of searches that fail to return a correct match at the top candidate position. On accuracy, ROC reports a first-place global Rank-1 result on the Extended Feature Set subset of the FBI-provided solved dataset, a tie for first among Western providers on the FBI Laboratory dataset, and error-rate improvements of up to two times across evaluated conditions.

“Latent fingerprint recognition is one of the most technically challenging evaluations in biometrics,” said ROC CEO B. Scott Swann, adding that the results show “American-made biometrics can lead globally” in technologies supporting public safety and national security. Chief scientist and co-founder Brendan Klare said the submission optimized “both accuracy and throughput,” the two factors that most affect large-scale latent search.

The company is positioning the numbers commercially, casting itself as a domestic alternative to legacy foreign biometric systems for agencies modernizing their Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) infrastructure, and arguing that faster searches on less hardware lower the total cost of large deployments. That pitch aligns with a run of government-facing milestones for the firm, which recently received a DHS SAFETY Act designation for its ROC Watch video analytics platform and appointed industry veteran Gary Lac to lead sales and marketing.

NIST evaluations are widely cited in federal, defense, and international procurement, which gives independent rankings outsized weight in a market where agencies are wary of self-reported performance claims.

Sources: GlobeNewswire

–

By the ID Tech Editorial Team