The Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Innovation Lab is developing an analytical platform called the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn). RAVEn facilitates large, complex analytical projects to support ICE’s mission to enforce and investigate violations of U.S. criminal, civil, and administrative laws. RAVEn also enables users to develop new tools to analyze trends and isolate criminal patterns as HSI mission needs arise. For more information, please read the DHS/ICE/PIA-055 - Privacy Impact Assessment 055 for the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn).
RAVEn CAT is being developed as part of an effort to modernize HSI’s Form I-9 Inspection Process. The goal is to use machine learning and automation to increase the speed and efficiency of ingesting and processing Forms I-9 data. Easy to use front-end interface workflow that increases work productivity and reduces manual entry. RAVEn CAT currently employs an Optical Recognition Service (OCR) model and software (Tesseract OCR) to identify pixel coordinates of handwritten and read/extract computer typed characters from ingested forms for processing. Additional research into opensource Machine Learning Object Detection models is being made to help further augment accuracy of text identification and extraction of ingested forms into the pipeline.