OMBRA LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A20-075

Description

There is tremendous interest in the possibility of collecting, processing, and matching touchless fingerprints due to the potential for increasing the overall speed and convenience associated with noncontact collection methods. This is enabled by leveraging the billions of dollars of mobile device investments to improve imagers and processing power.   These devices now have the capability of capturing high resolution images and the onboard processing of complicated algorithms. Once images are collected, the mobile device could process the image and match the imaged print to watchlists stored onboard the device even during periods when communication to existing databases is limited.  Other advantages include the ability to process soiled fingerprints without the need to carry bulky single use biometric devices given the wide proliferation of mobile technology to Soldiers and SOF.  Ombra proposes our Touchless Fingerprint Identification Toolkit (TFIT) software development kit (SDK) as an innovative solution to the challenge of fingerprint matching in an operational environment.  Our SDK has the potential to completely replace conventional fingerprinting techniques upon successful demonstration that the capability meets NIST SP 500-305 testing for 1 to many matching and backwards compatibility to existing datasets. Ombra’s proposed TFIT SDK, is a significant improvement over the state of the art due to the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence, Presentation Attack Detection (PAD), completely automated image processing, and a novel approach to limited communications. Ombra proposes to develop a version 1.0 SDK of our TFIT software as well as to extend an ongoing interoperability study while leveraging our ongoing AFWERX PAD development to derisk the version 2.0 development.