Synthetic Data Generation for Property and Passenger Screening

The Office of Procurement Operations (OPO) on behalf of the Office of Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) hereby issues this notice of intent to award a sole source procurement.  DHS OPO intends to solicit and award support services as a sole source contract to Cignal LLC, 7991 E Back Mountain Road, Reedsville, Pennsylvania 17084-8823.  This is a notice of intent to solicit and award a sole source contract under the authority of FAR 6.103-1 “Only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements”. The relevant NAICS code is 541715 Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology), with a size standard of 1,000 employees. The PSC code is AJ12, General Science and Technology R&D Services; General science and technology; Applied Research.

Summary of the requirement

Background

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Screening at Speed (SaS) program pursues transformative research and development (R&D) activities that support a future vision for increasing aviation security effectiveness from curb to gate while dramatically reducing wait times and improving the passenger experience. Building and testing reliable machine vision Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems requires access to large amounts of high-quality, labeled data. For homeland security applications, there are several barriers to getting this data: 1) threats are constantly evolving; 2) tailored sensor data (particularly threat data) is expensive to acquire; 3) manual annotation is time consuming; and 4) security datasets are massive and difficult to share. To address these challenges, Cignal created the Cignal Engine prototype which is a suite of simulation and multi-spectral data lifecycle tools to support machine vision AI Development and Operations (DevOps). This technology requires further maturation before transition to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can be initiated.

Scope

Cignal shall further develop its prototype and demonstrate software tools that support synthetic data generation suitable for public algorithm development (non-sensitive) and Government development, testing, and evaluation (sensitive). It is anticipated that Cignal  will collaborate with potential end users at S&T, TSA, and elsewhere to validate tools and generated images for suitability for machine learning development, training, testing, and evaluation over the course of the contract.

Place of Performance: The primary place of performance will be at contractor facilities.

Period of Performance: 12 month base period, one 12 month option periods       

Market research has determined that only Cignal can support the continued maturation of the technology that Cignal developed under previous efforts for DHS S&T. A determination by the Government not to compete based upon responses to this notice is solely at the discretion of the Government.

This is a notice of the intent to award a sole source contract. It is published for informational purposes only and not a request for competitive proposals. Therefore, no solicitation document exists for this requirement.  Any firm believing that they can fulfill the requirement may be considered by the agency. Interested parties may identify their interest and capabilities in response to this synopsis. All questions and/or comments regarding this notice shall be addressed in writing to the Contracting Officer Jennifer.Koons@hq.dhs.gov by September 7, 2026 by 10:00 AM Eastern.  Questions by phone will not be considered.