Скачать или смотреть IAFIS: The FBI’s Digital Fingerprint Revolution — Algorithms, Minutiae & Sun Servers (Ep. 553)

Episode 3 of our FBI Database History series dives into the moment law enforcement entered the era of digital identity. In 1999, the FBI launched IAFIS — the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a nationwide biometric platform capable of matching fingerprints in minutes instead of days.

This episode breaks down the actual technology behind IAFIS:
FBI‑certified 500 DPI scanners from Identix & Cross Match
ANSI/NIST‑ITL Type‑9 minutiae templates
Ridge endings, bifurcations, core/delta detection
Hamming‑distance scoring & candidate ranking
Sun Enterprise servers and custom ASIC matchers
Millions of comparisons per second
24/7 distributed architecture with mirrored storage
Integration with NCIC identity records

IAFIS processed 62,000 fingerprint submissions per day and became the largest biometric database in the world. It solved the scale crisis of the 1980s and set the stage for the next leap: NGI — the FBI’s modern biometric super‑system with palm prints, facial recognition, iris scans, and cloud‑based analytics.

If you want to understand how today’s FBI identification systems were born, you have to start with IAFIS.

📺 Next Episode:
Episode 4 — NGI: The Biometric Super‑System

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