Mobile Automated Fingerprint Identification System (MAFIS): An Android-based Criminal Tracking System using Fingerprint Minutiae Structure

Abstract

The Philippines, being an archipelago consisting of 7 640 islands, faces challenges on criminal identification processes turnaround time. All fingerprints recovered from the crime scenes needed to be forwarded to the national headquarter for identification and resolution. These are being compared and matched against a database of known and unknown fingerprints. The result is then delivered back to the requesting agent. In this purview, this study aims to design and develop a Mobile Automated Fingerprint Identification System (MAFIS) – An Android-based Criminal Tracking System. In this study, the prototype developed consists of an android mobile app, a web-based app, and a desktop app extension of the web app. The android mobile app was designed for roaming scenes of the crime operative (SOCO) agents. This allowed remote users deployed on-site to perform an initial inquiry of the latent fingerprint recovered and processed from the crime scene. The mobile app can search, compare, and match against the latent and tenprint databases. If there is a match, the system will display the similarity percentage of the analysis and add or link it to the existing record; otherwise, it will be counted as a new record. It also permits users to view the system dashboard, access the crime management module, search history, and manage profiles. The web-based app has the same capability as the mobile app but with added features like tenprint identification. The web app was primarily designed for police sub-stations deployment used by duty investigators to capture tenprints from law-offenders during the suspect booking process. This can match and identify tenprint from the database. If there is a match, a new criminal record will be added to the existing criminal records of the law offenders. If there is no match, the system will create a new record and store it on the system database.