DR Congo Voter Registration Project

MegaMatcher ABIS provided simultaneous deduplication of more than 46.5 million multibiometric voter records in less than two months to prepare for DRC 2018 elections.

Vilnius, Lithuania – April 24, 2018 – Neurotechnology, a provider of high-precision biometric identification technologies, today announced the completion of a massive multibiometric voter registration deduplication project for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Working directly with the Independent National Electoral Commission (Commission Électorale Nationale Indépendante or CENI) in the DRC, Neurotechnology used their MegaMatcher Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) turnkey solution based on the MegaMatcher Accelerator Extreme (MMA Extreme) matching engine to perform simultaneous deduplication of more than 46.5 million multibiometric facial and fingerprint voter records – an all-with-all comparison with a magnitude of 46.5 million x 46.5 million records. The system completed the job in less than two months, utilizing only 11 servers for matching and identifying more than 5.3 million duplicates – more than 10% of the original voter database.

“In the voter registry cleaning process our goal is to find as many duplicates and other noncompliant cases as possible,” said Mr. Corneille Nangaa Yobeluo, president of Commission Électorale Nationale Indépendante. “Neurotechnology helped us achieve our goals and exceeded our expectations by starting and completing the deduplication process in record time, and they were able to identify millions of duplicates.”

For the DRC, more than 46.5 million voter records were collected with 10 fingerprints and a facial biometric for each record. MegaMatcher ABIS identified more than 5.3 million duplicate records. Neurotechnology’s age estimation algorithm was used to check each registered voter’s photo, estimate age and flag potential noncompliant records for review. During this process more than 900,000 records were found as noncompliant according to voter age requirements. This will have a significant impact on the upcoming elections where DRC constituencies are represented in National and Provincial Assemblies based on their voter numbers. The accuracy of the process was verified by nearly 300 human operators who manually reviewed and confirmed the duplicates and under-age records identified by the system.

“To create, deploy and use Automated Biometric Identification Systems at a small scale is relatively easy; complexity and major challenges appear with scale,” said Denis Kacan, MegaMatcher ABIS product manager for Neurotechnology. “With successful implementation of this project, our MegaMatcher ABIS and MegaMatcher Accelerator Extreme products proved to be suitable for large national scale deployments.”

MMA Extreme is the fastest biometric matcher in the market, with extremely fast matching engines for fingerprint, iris and face biometrics that can be used separately or together in any configuration with databases of hundreds of millions of people enrolled. Each MMA Extreme unit (hardware + software) can match 1.2 billion fingerprints per second, 1.2 billion faces per second or 700 million irises per second on a single server with a GPU, and multiple units can be used together.

While some biometric systems attempt to simplify processing and enhance speed by splitting deduplication by regions or by dividing people into groups (e.g. by age or gender), this reduction in complexity can also reduce accuracy. So, to ensure the highest possible accuracy, the MMA Extreme system compared every one of the DRC’s more than 46.5 million multibiometric records with every other record. This level of magnitude required an extremely fast and powerful matching engine and was made possible only with MMA Extreme.

MegaMatcher ABIS is Neurotechnology’s turnkey multibiometric solution for large-scale identification projects. It is a modular and customizable solution that provides services for high-performance multi-biometric systems with multiple transactions using any combination of fingerprint, face or eye iris biometric modalities. It is available as a complete system and ready for the deployment in national-scale projects.

MegaMatcher ABIS, MegaMatcher Accelerator Extreme and the entire Neurotechnology biometric product line can be purchased from Neurotechnology and through distributors worldwide. A free 30-day trial is available and, as with all Neurotechnology products, the latest version is a free upgrade for existing customers. For more information, go to www.neurotechnology.com.

Neurotechnology will be exhibiting at ID4Africa 2018, from April 24th to 26th in Abuja, Nigeria. Meet us at booth C12.