Joanna Crews
The State Department plans to award a sole-source potential five-year contract for facial recognition software to Idemia.
The contract for the Facial Recognition (FR) program will include a one-year base performance period and four one-year options, DoS said through a notice posted on June 5 on the Federal Business Opportunities website.
Work will include program management and technicians’ services and will support the requirements of the Consular Affairs’ Office of Consular Systems Technology.
The FR program is intended to help screen and identify the more than 30 million annual passport and visa applicants through biometrics comparisons to legacy and watch-list databases.
The contract includes infrastructure, network and software maintenance and management; cost and schedule documentation and reporting; test support and training services.
DoS’ Office of Acquisition Management will award the contract in accordance with the implementation of a U.S. Code by a Federal Acquisition Regulation authority.
The department intends to avoid the need to change approximately 360 million existing face templates to a different proprietary format. The current Consular Electronic Application Center employs Idemia’s Quality Over the Web and Quality Assessment SDK 6.3, with the plan to convert the platform over to Consular One (C1).
DoS will accept responses from other interested companies until July 10, 2018 at 9:00 a.m. EST and evaluate the acquisition strategy based on the received statements.
Idemia currently performs similar work under an existing contract that will expire by Sept. 29, 2018.
