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About Criminal Investigation

Innovatrics ABIS Criminal Investigation is a comprehensive platform designed to support forensic specialists and law-enforcement officers throughout the entire life-cycle of a criminal investigation. It combines a state-of-the-art biometric identification engine with a rich set of investigative tools, allowing agencies to:

  • enrol and maintain biometric records of known persons of interest (suspects, persons in custody, persons with prior convictions),
  • collect, store and process forensic evidence – latent prints, palm prints, facial photographs, video recordings, DNA profiles and other case-related material,
  • perform fast and accurate biometric searches against very large reference galleries,
  • organize the work of forensic teams using configurable workflows and queues,
  • document examination decisions in a way that is fully auditable and stands up to judicial scrutiny.

How Criminal Investigation works​

A typical investigation processed in ABIS goes through the following stages:

  1. Case is opened. An investigator (or any other authorized user) creates a case – a logical container for everything related to one criminal incident.
  2. Evidence is collected. Crime-scene technicians upload evidence to the case: latent fingerprints, photographs of suspects taken from CCTV, recordings from body-worn cameras, DNA samples or other supporting documents.
  3. Examination is created. For each piece of biometric evidence one or more examinations are created. An examination is the basic unit of work in the system and the entity that carries the ACE-V state; all subsequent forensic activity is performed against an examination, not directly against the evidence.
  4. Evidence is enhanced inside the Analysis examination. Forensic specialists open the Analysis examination in the Latent Editor (or the equivalent face-editing tools) and prepare the biometric sample for matching – minutiae are detected and refined, regions of interest are defined, image quality is improved. The original evidence is never modified – every change is recorded against the examination.
  5. Identification runs. The examiner searches the prepared probe against the criminal galleries (records of known persons) and the case galleries (collection of evidence from previous cases). The system returns a ranked candidate list.
  6. Comparison. The Comparison Tool presents the probe and the candidate side-by-side. The examiner can mark matching minutiae, draw visual annotations and take notes.
  7. Decision. The examiner records a decision: Individualized, Excluded or Inconclusive. A hit record stores the decision permanently and a hit detail report is generated automatically.
  8. Verification. A second qualified examiner independently reviews the work as required by the ACE-V methodology.
  9. Court presentation. All artefacts – images, annotations, snapshots, the search history and the hit detail report – remain available for export and presentation in court.

Where Criminal Investigation fits in the ABIS platform​

Criminal Investigation is delivered as a configurable subset of the wider Innovatrics ABIS platform. It re-uses the same core services that power civil deployments – the matcher, the extractor, the data service and the authorization service – but layers on top of them a dedicated Investigation service, a forensic UI, the Latent Editor and a number of forensic-specific data structures. The split is summarized in the diagram below.

+-------------------------------+   +--------------------------------+
|        Forensic UI            |   |  Web Supervisor (audit/admin)  |
|  (Cases, Evidence, ACE-V)     |   |                                |
+--------------+----------------+   +---------------+----------------+
               |                                    |
               v                                    v
+--------------+------------------------------------+----------------+
|                       Investigation Service                       |
|     (Cases, Evidences, Examinations, Hits, Snapshots, Visual      |
|                annotations, Migration, Reporting)                 |
+--------------+--------------------+---------------+----------------+
               |                    |               |
               v                    v               v
        +------+-----+      +-------+------+   +----+-------+
        |  Matcher   |      |   Extractor  |   | Data svc   |
        +------------+      +--------------+   +------------+

The Criminal Investigation product line is fully compatible with the standard ABIS galleries, biometric individuals and the workflow engine. It can be deployed:

  • Stand-alone for agencies whose only mission is criminal investigation, or
  • Side-by-side with civil registers in mixed deployments where the same biometric backend is used for both criminal and non-criminal purposes (with strict access separation between the two).

Forensic standards supported​

Criminal Investigation follows the standards normally encountered in forensic environments:

  • ANSI/NIST-ITL for biometric data exchange, including ten-print, palm-print and latent records.
  • ISO/IEC 19794 family for biometric data formats (faces, fingerprints, irises).
  • NCIC codes for SMT (Scars, Marks, Tattoos), body and face descriptors.
  • WSQ compression for fingerprint and latent images, JPEG2000 for facial photographs.
  • ACE-V as the governing forensic methodology for friction-ridge examinations.