Maranhão’s biometric identification system by Innovatrics offers multiple uses for police work

Police in Brazilian state of Maranhão is using biometrics by Innovatrics both to issue reliable driver’s licenses and solve criminal cases. Since the deployment, two more states have opted for the technology provided by the company together with its local partner Valid.

Police in the Brazilian state of Maranhão are upgrading its registry infrastructure with Innovatrics ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System). The system will be primarily used to issue driver’s licenses. The biometrics will take care of preventing duplicates. The data from the older database of licenses has actually been migrated over. The deduplication has revealed a number of duplicates, showing that some people have received identity documents under different identities. With biometrics in place, mistakes such as these can be prevented.

The criminal part of ABIS will significantly decrease the time necessary to identify suspects in the cases. “The system provides case management capabilities and apart from fingerprints and faces the records also contain photos of scars, marks and tattoos tagged in standardized manner to help identify people by other means than just biometrics,” explains Matus Kapusta, the head of government solutions at Innovatrics.

The third use of the ABIS is to identify children and prevent trafficking. Children’s fingerprints are usually a difficult problem to tackle successfully, but Innovatrics devised a special algorithm that autoscales them up for better identification and uses papillary line distance to set the correct autoscaling.

The deduplication of existing biometric records allows the state to prevent ID fraud. With the new criminal ABIS in place, it can also help catch perpetrators, further improving public safety in the state. Since the deployment of the system, two more Brazilian states, Spirito Santo and Rio Grande do Sul, have opted for the same solution.