Describe AFIS.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

AFIS, which is a term still used out of habit and legacy, later morphed into IAFIS, or Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which included both the fingerprint records and criminal history database with identification and response capabilities. In NGI, data on fingerprints is now held within the Advanced Fingerprint Identification Technology (AFIT) system. AFIT offers enhanced fingerprint and latent processing services, and it implements a new fingerprint-matching algorithm that improves the matching ability of 92 percent with the old AFIS to better than 96.2 percent within IAFIS. AFIT also offers faster response times, fewer rejections, increased frequency of matches, and other functional improvements.
AFIT allows law enforcement agencies to conduct comparisons of applicant and suspect fingerprints with literally thousands or millions of file prints in a matter of minutes. A manual search of this nature would take hundreds of hours with little hope of success. The heart of the technology is the ability of the computer equipment to scan and digitize fingerprints by reading spacing and ridge patterns and translating them into the appropriate computer language coding. The computer is capable of making extremely fine distinctions among prints, lending greater accuracy and reliability to the system. Today, IAFIS and AFIT are part of the overall Next Generation Identification project being developed by the FBI.