Open Source Solution Required: Issuing 100 million secure voter ID cards to the citizens of Bangladesh

Hello,

Given the idea of having voter ID card for all the citizens of Bangladesh, I was thinking of assessing few things before it actually starts. The election commission, the government agency responsible for issuing voter ID cards in Bangladesh might plan to use this - not only to hold a fair election but to facilitate its citizen to establish their credentials seeking access to all government and other commercial privileges - from opening a bank account to buying a cell phone, etc.

Project: Cost Assessment of Data center for Voter List supported by Biometrical Technology.

It might sound pretty lame, but I was trying to figure out what might be the approximate cost when it comes to assess the required computational power for satisfactory finger print matching speed and the storage involve of 100 million records. I know this complete solution has to be multi-platform oriented, but it is always preferred that a single solution developer can optimize the requirement of number the clusters involve for fingerprint matching at a ratio of 1:100 millions. The effective matching speed increases proportionally to the number of cluster's nodes, which we are yet to explore. The COTS hardware can be used for matching AFIS. If google can do it, we should be be able to reach that target.

Here are some details:

1. # of fields including image and tenprint information = 28 = 100 KB
2. Maximum byte in WSQ or other biometric standard (tenprint)= 4.2 KB x 10 = 42 KB
3. Image = 20 KB

Total size = 162 KB/Person.

We have 100 million people to be issued with voter ID card.

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Few of the Existing Solution Provider's case study (through my web research)

Digimarc, a company based in US has similar solution on photo-based voter ID card, which was applied to countries like Mexico and Haiti. Hyundai has more advanced solution via its unique AFIS interface. It does data conversion, processing and searching (1:1, 1:N) as per its brochure. Neurotechnologija from Lithuania has great product like Megamatcher that is designed to meet large-scale biometrical identification and verification needs. The SDK provided for this makes it very attractive for AFIS developers to have solution like this. Say, the example of HANIS can be cited, which will eventually become one of the largest civilian fingerprint databases in the world. For better identification of 43 million citizens, the department of home affairs in South Africa (HANIS) contacted Unisys along with other partners. The government of Malaysia's "MyKad" is another example.

The case study of EURODAC is one of the best examples of AFIS. As it's says "under the EURODAC system, each participating State will promptly take the prints of all fingers of every asylum seeker over the age of 14. These fingerprints are compared with fingerprint data transmitted by other participating States and already stored in the central database. If EURODAC reveals that the fingerprints have already been recorded, the asylum seeker will be sent back to the country where his/ her fingerprints were originally recorded."

For storage solution; I think Netapp's "data ontap GX" systems are optimized to meet the demanding requirements of secure voter ID cards database which will eventually lead to the formulation of smart National ID system. It's pricey; do we have cheaper alternatives? Oracle is the greatest database on earth but can that be cheaper (CAL) for developing country like ours? Mysql, localization of databases and use of clusters can serve our purpose.

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These solutions might be little out of hand when budget is tight. Tough call; but we would like to do this mammoth job utilizing our own local resources from the global perspective. With proper guidance, I believe, we can do that too. The open source solution can be prioritized when that outsmarts other competitive commercial solutions. We will have a separate project for data accumulation which is kept aside here.

Any help is appreciated on assessing of financial aspect of the said data center.
Thanks in advance.

--
Raqueeb Hassan
Bangladesh