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Contract Opportunity

Notice of Intent to Sole Source

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) intends to negotiate on a sole-source basis with Schwarz Forensic Enterprises, INC. (SFE) under the authority of FAR 13.106-1(b)(1)(i) for Latent and Exemplar Fingerprints Feature Extraction and Matching Support Services.

Background Information and Basis for Sole Source

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Information Technology Laboratory, Information Access Division, Image Group requires contractual support for matching latent friction ridge images with exemplar images by means of extracting and correlating friction ridge features.

As part of the Intelligence Advance Research Project Activity (IARPA)’s Nail‐to‐Nail (N2N) Challenge, NIST acquired thousands of latent and exemplar friction ridge images. In turn, NIST released a portion of this data as an open dataset entitled “NIST Special Database 302.” In its current state, the data is only minimally useful to researchers. At a basic level, it is known that a latent friction ridge image came from a particular individual, but not which finger or palm from that individual.

NIST is seeking support services to accurately match latent friction ridge images with exemplar images by extracting and correlating friction ridge features. The contractor shall manually extract fingerprint features and digitize them as required by Extended Feature Set (EFS) Profile 2 in an ANSI/NIST ITL 1‐ 2011 Update: 2015 LFFS record. The contractor shall also include the digital documentation of correspondence proof with an EFS Comparison (COMP) file.

NIST was a co-investigator in the IARPA Nail to Nail (N2N) Challenge. The N2N Challenge was overseen by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) as it involved human subjects. The IRB approved the N2N Challenge with SFE’s latent biometric data as the source. SFE was the only approved source of biometric data listed in the IRB research protocol for the N2N Challenge. The biometric data is are the property of SFE. As the certified latent print examiners and certified human subjects protection research experts responsible for collecting the latent biometric data in the first place, SFE is in a unique position in which they already have access to the derived and raw data, and have been successfully trusted in keeping it sequestered.

Only SFE is capable of meeting the needs of this requirement as SFE is the only source of the IRB approval data for the N2N Challenge.

General

The North American Classification System (NAICS) code for this acquisition is 541990 - All Other Professional, Scientific and Technical Services. The small business size standard is $19.5 million. Schwarz Forensic Enterprises, INC., Inc is a small business under this NAICS code.

No solicitation package will be issued. This notice of intent is not a request for competitive quotations; however, responses received by the listed due date, will be considered by the Government.

A determination by the Government not to compete the proposed acquisition based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement.

Interested parties that believe they could satisfy the requirements listed above for NIST may clearly and unambiguously identify their capability to do so in writing on or before the response due date for this notice. This notice of intent is not a solicitation. Any questions regarding this notice must be submitted in writing via email to Hing Pan Wong at hnw6@nist.gov. All responses to this notice of intent must be submitted so that they are received at hnw6@nist.gov no later than the aforementioned due date.

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