BioLink Delivers Its Powerful Matchers for the E-Passport of Senegal

The Republic of Senegal (West Africa) is another African country that launches the e-passport project complying with the stipulations mandated by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) for machine-readable travel documents protecting the privacy of users against identity theft. In addition, e-passports assist in streamlining the immigration activities and keeping records of visitors coming to the country in real time.

The system is expected to cover 3 Mio citizens of Senegal. It will operate in one main passport operation center in Dakar and eight regional passport operation centers in the Republic of Senegal. In addition, the system will be spread worldwide with another eight overseas passport operation centers in embassies of Senegal in various countries. The Dakar International Airport will be equipped with four Immigration Autogates enhanced with BioLink biometrics for safe, swift and effortless flow of passengers exiting and arriving to the country.

BioLink is responsible for the biometric component of the system, namely for managing and matching the biometric credentials, such as the passport holders’ live fingerprints captured by a biometric scanner. For this project, BioLink supplied the biometric management server and 8 biometric matchers (2 quad-core processors each) intended to do the fast fingerprint comparison within 24 hours. The biometric matching is performed based on BioLink’s proprietary fingerprint matching algorithms supporting the key international and industry standards, such as ISO/IEC, ANSI/NIST, ANSI INCITS and WSQ. IRIS Corporation Berhad, BioLink’s frequent partner in nationwide identification projects, is in charge of providing a fully integrated and highly secure solution for the enrollment, personalization and issuance of e-passport to the Senegalese as well as the appropriate support services within the period of 20 years.

Piotr Pertsov, Director of Business Development in BioLink, says: “We are involved in this large identification project thanks to lasting relationship with IRIS. However, BioLink has sufficient experience in cooperating with African governments, and we are quite confident we’ll give this project the best care and attention until the customer is completely satisfied.”

About BioLink

BioLink, a leading provider of biometric identification solutions, develops, manufactures, and markets advanced fingerprint biometric products. The Company’s products and services form the core of biometric identification and authentication solutions for all scale civil identification, access control and information security applications. BioLink’s solutions provide the optimal total cost of ownership in the industry and are being implemented by corporate and government entities worldwide. For additional information, please visit BioLink’s web site at http://www.biolinksolutions.com.

About IRIS

IRIS Corporation Berhad is a global security solution provider with core expertise in the area of securing government security documents i.e. National ID and Passport. IRIS pioneered the world’s first electronic passport and national multi-application smart card with the implementation of the Malaysian Electronic Passport in March 1998 and MyKAD - the Malaysian Government Multi Purpose Card in April 2001. These technologies are deployed in many countries across the Asia, Middle East and Africa regions. IRIS also provides a full range of smart cards readers, integrated terminals, card personalization equipment and biometrics scanner to complement the application of its smart card solutions. For additional information, go to http://www.iris.com.my.