Independent Performance Evaluation of Biometric Systems

Often in the development of a biometric product the evaluator of the system is the same institution who developed the algorithm. Furthermore, usually the test data set is also collected by the same developer/evaluator and in most cases such database will not be public. Consequently, test results cannot be verified by independent institutions. Although this can be justifiable (e.g. in the optimization phase of an algorithm), from the perspective of a potential customer it reduces trustworthiness of the developed system and reported performances. Therefore, for performance evaluation the availability of independent databases and desirably independent evaluators are very important. It is also essential that algorithm developers do not have access to the testing database and thus the risk of tuned algorithms is minimized. Pseudonymous identifiers (PI) are complementary to imageor minutiaebased references and provide a level that is both more privacy protective and more efficient than symmetric or asymmetric encryption of a biometric reference image or minutiae template record [1]. With PI an individual retains complete control of its biometric data as multiple PI can be generated from a single biometric characteristic without any risk that these can be linked together. At the same time any of these identifiers can be cancelled and replaced by a new one if needed. Research on such PI is a core objective of the TURBINE project [2]. This work presents the biometric performance test report on a fingerprint performance evaluation that has been generated in the context of the TURBINE project [2]. It is worth to emphasize that this performance report is results of the first testing round which are not final results of the project. For the second and final testing round, project partners will submit their improved algorithms, and its results will be available in year 2011. Furthermore, here we only report the ”biometric performance” per se of the algorithms while the ”security performance” of the PI algorithms is evaluated by others in TURBINE.