Police departments in seven Indian states have solved more than 500 crimes with a biometric system that links fingerprint and palmprint collection at crime scenes with district databases in real-time, providing almost instantaneous biometric matching and identification results. The system, which enrolls, matches, and identifies prints against both new and existing print records, also searches state and national databases. In the state of Kerala alone, fifteen criminal cases were solved in the first six months using the new system.

The Criminal AFPIS Enterprise Solution, which was developed by SecureMantra Technologies Ltd based on VeriFinger and MegaMatcher biometric technologies from Neurotechnology, is also being used to train police in biometric criminal investigation at the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Science (NICFS) in New Delhi.

The solution is administered by each state’s police department under the jurisdiction of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Ministry of Home Affairs, and has been benchmarked and certified by the NCRB. The first system came online in 2005 and since that time a total of seven states have deployed the system. To date, more than 1 million new criminal records (each of which includes 10 prints) have been enrolled, more than 10,000 criminals have been identified, and more than 500 crimes have been solved from latent prints with the aid of the solution.

Criminal investigators in India sought a new tool that would quickly and accurately match and identify fingerprints taken at crime scenes to the larger, amassed collection in police files. SecureMantra, a biometrics firm based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, developed the first version of the system in 2002. The system was designed to include existing print records—especially difficult-to-read and partial latent prints—as well as newly collected records.

The system has continued to evolve and the current version, Criminal AFPIS Enterprise Solution 5.2, uses VeriFinger 6.0 for fingerprint feature extraction, enrollment, and matching and now also includes palm print capability based on the MegaMatcher multi-biometric identification engine. The current version of the system is now being run in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Mizoram, Orissa, Rajasthan, and Tripura, with additional states forthcoming.

The individual states have seen impressive results from the system in a very short time. In the first six months after installation of the latest version of the system in the state of Kerala, a database of 234,000 records of criminal legacy prints was established and fifteen latent print matches led directly to the solving of fifteen criminal cases.