Examination of Firearms Review: 2007 to 2010 - Interpol

subject of several articles (88-91) and (92) analyses a risk in image
enhancement.
The incorporation of the Prüm treaty is defined as follows: a decentralised system will
be used, where each nation has its database, and the contact points of other nations
will have access to reference data (67). A detailed description of how this data is to
be exchanged (format, communication channels) is provided (68). Estimated daily
maximum throughputs for the different countries (for different search modalities) are
available (69). Good practice for such searches is proposed (70); e.g. to start with the
most relevant searches, and to grade the importance between crime types.
An overview of past work on fingerprint quality in US-VISIT is presented (72). A
performance improvement by using two fingers and two stages (rather than
increasing the number of fingers used to ten) for US-VISIT has been proposed. This
two-stage process is compared to a two-stage process including two fingers and the
face (71). The two-stage process for fingerprints consists first in a minutiae-based
matcher and second on a texture-based matcher. The detection probability is
increased with respect to minutiae based matching both by using minutia matching
and face and minutiae and texture matching, but more so for the second option.
The challenge of the increasing use of data interchange has been thematised.
Discussions of both data interchange between countries (73) and between states,
cities and federal government (74) have been published. This second reference also
includes a historical overview and discusses connectivity between systems, which is
opposed to interoperability (74). The interoperability between systems from different
vendors and related challenges are described and investigated (75); in particular, the
reduction of information in standard-compliant minutiae templates (as opposed to the
proprietary format) significantly increased error rates in the different systems used, in
a test carried out on a total of 4041 index fingers.
A comparison between different systems has been carried out (76). The different
technology providers who participated in the trial were Motorola, Inc., Sonda
Technologies, Ltd., NEC Corporation, Peoplespot, Inc., SPEX Forensics, Inc.,
Cogent, Inc., L1 Identity Solutions and BioMG, Ltd. Each technology provider
submitted a software development kit (SDK), and the submission of research
algorithms was encouraged for the study. The test set consisted of 835 marks and
their ten-print mates, showing sufficient information to result in an identification
conclusion. Two background databases were also used, one containing 5000 records
and one containing 10000 records (50000 and 100000 fingerprints). The rank 1 and
rank 10 identification rates are reported, as well as other measures. Particularly
interesting is the fact that both the original images at 1000 dpi and the same images
downsampled to 500 dpi were used. Most software development kits showed an
increase in performance when 1000 dpi images were used (as opposed to 500 dpi);
this improvement was not huge, however. Also, while some hits were gained with the
increase in resolution, some others were lost. A related short communication has
also been published (93).
Database filtering, indexing and clustering has been treated in the following articles:
(78) and (79) use singular points for database filtering; indexing is proposed by (80),
(81) and (82), and finally database clustering is the subject of (83). The specialised
229