Technology and Communication

Technology and Communication

The most important aspect of our everyday life is communication which allows people to connect with each other. In todays society technology has changed the methods in which we communicate with new advances that have evolved. This is true within our personal lives aswell as in our workplaces. In the Criminal Justice System there has been new technology that has modified the communication abilities within a specialized databases. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which is also know has the AFIS will communicate with the Facial Recognition database and together the two database will come up with results. The characteristics of fingerprints and facial features can help to deliver a unique way to help identify people. Everyone has distinctive characteristics within their fingers and facial features that makes everyone unique. Comparing and contrasting the characteristics of everyone's fingerprints and facial features manually can be very tedious because there all kinds of different points that need to be compared. Within the criminal justice system the most valued commodity is time. The amount of time that is used can make a difference between life or death in some of cases.

Fingerprint images that are gather in AFIS and is stored within it's electronic database. There two types of fingerprints that the technicians collect known sources, and unknown sources. Technicians acquire these samples for different types of people from convicted felons who need to be finger printed for processing reason to schoolteachers needing to have a background check ran. The samples collected from unknown sources are usually collected at the crime scene, to be later compared with the known source samples, which are referred to as the latent prints. These samples are entered into a database, the technician will look at the fingerprint and the different identifying patterns and all the different characteristics within the fingerprint. According to Ridges and Furrows (2001), Full sets of 'ten print' fingerprint records, after being examined by a trained technician, are stored on AFIS. Each fingerprint image is 'filed' based on its pattern type, its core-delta distance and minutiae (Para. 3). This allows the technicians to compare the prints faster because they can eliminate the prints that do not have the same pattern as the sample does. Here is an example, when the technician is looking at the print and the print has loops, the technician can eliminate all the prints that have whorls within them. If the search can be done faster there can be a faster chance that the person can be identified. Once there a match that could be a potential match, the technician must still compare it manually to help to ensure the accuracy of the match. The technician examines the potential match to see if the simples are alike or to see if they have the similar pattern. If the match is a positive match, the information can be used to help to identify the person.

The database of biometrics is used in facial recognition. According to Woodward, J. D., Horn, C., Gatune, J., & Thomas, A. (2003), the definition of biometrics is the automatic recognition of a person using distinguishing traits (Discussion of Biometrics, Para. 1). Within the biometric, the computer uses facial photographs to compare the characteristics of the face and successively tries to make a potential match. There five steps to help to accomplished the facial recognition, step one is to acquire an image of the face, step two is to employ the software to detect the location of many facial images within the acquired photograph, step three is to obtain the features