Cross Match unveils three new biometric products

Published 19 September 2006

Smaller, faster, and lighter is the company’s motto; new biometric Jumpkit for military is 30 percent smaller and five pounds lighter than previous iteration; Guardian R checkpoint scanner gets tougher, too; company rounds out offerings with ten-finger, fifteen second, scanning middleware

When American soldiers in Iraq come to the scene of an exploded improvised explosive device (IED), witnesses often behave like those in mafia-dominated 1930s New York: “I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything, I don’t know anything.” Frustrating as this is, the military has found another way to collect evidence and locate the bomber: the first thing they do is pull out their Cross Match biometric Jumpkit and collect the fingerprints of everyone in the area. The information is then either relayed by network or stored on disk for comparison against pertinent terrorist databases. By repeating the process multiple times, deduction leads them to the perpetrator.

Cross Match was already an innovative biometrics company long before it began focussing on ruggedization, but it believes smaller and stronger is the way the market is heading. The company’s latest offerings, unveiled this week at the 2006 Biometrics Consortium being held this week in Baltimore, show off its ability to repackage effective solutions for wider use. The new Jumpkit, for instance, is 30 percent smaller than the original Jumpkit and weighs five pounds less. The company also announced a tougher version of its Guardian R (for ‘rugged’) fingerprint capture device, often used at checkpoints located in wet and dusty conditions. The machine is now protected in an ingress protection IP66 metal casing and has an integrated light filter permitting outdoor use.

The company also announced the release of its Guardian FAST (Fast Autocapture of Slaps and Thumbs) middleware package that complies with government directives to deliver ten finger captures within fifteen seconds (the company claims it can do it in a mindboggling ten seconds).

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