Pennsylvania’s Sex Offender Registration Tool (PA SORT)

The question marks on the equipment standards are due to the fact that you may or may not need the software required with each output/input device.  For instance, if the operating system has a driver you may not need to install any software.

Security information for equipment and room specifications is governed by the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy and CLEAN Administrative Regulations. Both are very restrictive and mirror each other. To view these specifications, please consult the documents below:

• Additional Equipment Details (PDF)
• Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy (PDF) 
• Pennsylvania State Police Regulations Version 4.7 / CLEAN Regulations (PDF) 

* Please note verification sites do not require a LiveScan device. Fingerprints will only be required for initial registration or anytime the offender’s true identity is in question. 

• Description of equipment (PDF)

Booking Center System Standard Specifications (PDF) 

The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) and its partners have developed this set of guidelines and technology standards to facilitate achieving the goals of Act 81 of 2008 and the Federal Walsh Act requirements. It has always been the desire of PCCD and its partners that, over time, ultimately, every Pennsylvania criminal arrest is digitally recorded with fingerprints, hand impressions, photographs, images of scars, marks, and tattoos, arrest demographics, and offenses charged; and then successfully submitted to the computerized central repositories at the Pennsylvania State Police. It is also desired that any other submissions (applicant, Megan’s Law registrations, etc.) to those repositories also meet standards for data quality. Further implementation of these guidelines and technology standards will help the Commonwealth to move towards achieving these goals and desires.

POSE: The full-face or frontal pose is the most commonly used pose in photo lineups and shall always be captured. This pose is in addition to profiles or intermediate angled poses captured to acquire perspective and other information. For subjects who normally wear eyeglasses, a frontal mugshot image should be captured of the subject without glasses. This is required due to the glare from external illumination. An additional image can optionally be captured of the subject wearing eyeglasses.

DEPTH OF FIELD: The subject's captured facial image shall always be in focus from the nose to the ears. Although this may result in the background behind the subject being out of focus, it is not a problem. For optimum quality of the captured mugshot, the f-stop of the lens should be set at two f-stops below the maximum aperture opening when possible.

CENTERING : The facial image being captured (full-face pose) shall be positioned to satisfy all of the following conditions: 

1. The approximate horizontal mid-points of the mouth and of the bridge of the nose shall lie on an imaginary vertical straight line positioned at the horizontal center of the image.
2. An imaginary horizontal line through the center of the subject's eyes shall be located at approximately the 55% point of the vertical distance up from the bottom edge of the captured image.
3. The width of the subject's head shall occupy approximately 50% of the width of the captured image. This width shall be the horizontal distance between the mid-points of two imaginary vertical lines. Each imaginary line shall be drawn between the upper and lower lobes of each ear and shall be positioned where the external ear connects to the head.

LIGHTING: Subject illumination shall be accomplished using a minimum of three (3) point balanced illumination. Appropriate diffusion techniques shall also be employed and lights positioned to minimize shadows, and to eliminate hot spots on the facial image. These hot spots usually appear on reflective areas such as cheeks and foreheads. Proper lighting shall contribute to the uniformity of illumination of the background described in the exposure requirement

BACKGROUND: The subject whose image is being captured shall be positioned in front of a background which is 18% gray with a plain smooth flat surface. A Kodak or other neutral gray card or densitometer shall be used to verify this 18% gray reflectance requirement.

EXPOSURE: The exposure shall be keyed to the background. Several areas of the recorded 18% gray background shall be used to verify the proper exposure. The averages of the 8-bit Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) components within each area shall be calculated. Each of the RGB means shall fall between 105 and 125 with a standard deviation of plus or minus 10. Furthermore, for every area examined, the maximum difference between the means of any two of the RGB components shall not exceed 10.

ASPECT RATIO: The Width:Height aspect ratio of the captured image shall be 1:1.25.

MINIMUM NUMBER OF PIXELS: The minimum number of pixels in an electronic digital image shall be 480 pixels in the horizontal direction by 600 pixels in the vertical direction. It should be noted that the image quality of the captured mugshots and facial images will be improved as the number of pixels in both directions are increased. However, as images are captured with an increased number of pixels, the 1:1.25 (Width:Height) aspect ratio will be maintained.

Two considerations must be noted regarding this aspect of the recommendation. First, the normal orientation of many available cameras is the landscape format which specifies a greater number of pixels in the horizontal than in the vertical direction. Unless these cameras capture at least 600 pixels in the vertical direction, it may be necessary to rotate the camera 90 degrees. Second, the 480x600 capture format exceeds the VGA display format of 640x480. Therefore, at a minimum, an SVGA specification of 800x600 pixels will be required to display the facial image. The image will occupy less than the total number of available horizontal pixels.

COLORSPACE: Captured electronic color facial images are required. Digital images shall be represented as 24-bit RGB pixels. For every pixel, eight (8) bits will be used to represent each of the Red, Green, and Blue components. The RGB colorspace is the basis for other colorspaces including the Y, Cb, Cr and YUV. Additional color management techniques are available from the International Color Consortium. Information regarding these techniques can be downloaded from the following URL: www.color.org

PIXEL ASPECT RATIO: Digital cameras and scanners used to capture facial images shall use square pixels with a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1.

COMPRESSION ALGORITHM: The algorithm used to compress mugshot and facial images shall conform to the JPEG Sequential Baseline mode of operation as described in the specification approved by the ANSI X3L3 Standards committee. The target size for a JPEG compressed color mugshot image file shall be 25,000 to 45,000 bytes.

FILE FORMAT: The JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) shall contain the JPEG compressed image data. The JFIF file shall then be part of the transaction file for interchange which conforms to the requirements as contained in ANSI/NIST-CSL 1-1993 and ANSI/NIST-ITL 1a-1997.