A database of up to 50 million fingerprints can now be housed in a new Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) recently deployed by Public Safety Authority in China’s Anhui Province to help reduce its criminal investigations.

In partnership with NEC Corporations, the AFIS, the largest of its kind in China can help increase the hit rate on latent fingerprint inquiries by tenfold. The AFIS consists of 2,300 units that have established a database of over 11 million registered fingerprints taken from arrested suspects and crime scenes. Its high-speed capability can take in about 30 second to identify a single fingerprint, and the database can accommodate up to 50 million fingerprints.

This year, Anhui Province ranked the first position in an annual nationwide study conducted by Public Safety Authority to examine successful latent fingerprint identification from unresolved cases compared to other provinces.

The number of hits in Anhui Province was more than 1.5 times the number of an average year and the system’s reliability was further validated by its superior hit rate compared to other provinces for major crimes including homicide.