FBI Using More Facial Recognition Technology to Fight Crime
The FBI's face recognition office can now search databases with more than 641 million photos, including 21 state databases, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a recent report.
For decades, fingerprint analysis was the most widely used biometric technology for positively identifying arrestees and linking them with any previous criminal record, says GAO. Beginning in 2010, the FBI started to replace the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) with Next Generation Identification (NGI), which not only includes fingerprint data from IAFIS and biographic data, but also provides new functionality and improves existing capabilities by incorporating advancements in biometrics, like face recognition technology.