Cogent gets a hand in fingerprint ID work

Cogent Systems Inc. won a five-year, $20 million subcontract to provide management services and software development and maintenance for its automatic fingerprint identification solution to the U.S. Visit program, the company said today.Launched in January by the Homeland Security Department, U.S.Visit requires foreign visitors traveling on a visa to submit two scanned biometric fingerprints and have a digital photograph taken upon arrival in the United States. The program uses Cogent's technology to authenticate visitors' identities identity at high traffic areas of U.S. airports, seaports and land ports, and U.S. consulates overseas. Cogent has been providing its solution and service for the U.S. Visit program, as well as for the former Immigration and Naturalization Service program since 1994. Under its contract with Raytheon Co., a U.S. Visit subcontractor, Cogent will assist in implementing the fingerprint-matching portion of the DHS program. Fingerprints taken at entry points will be used by Cogent's subsystem to perform online searches against the biometric database. The matching subsystem can handle more than 100,000 transactions a day with an eight-second match response time.Cogent of South Pasadena, Calif., provides fingerprint recognition software and hardware for access control to governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide. It had reported revenue of $55.9 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30.