IEEE BMC Newsletter – Spring 2015

Published in TC News on 1 May 2015

Contributed by Venu Govindaraju, republished from the IEEE BMC Newsletter

Welcome Message from the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council

It is my great pleasure to begin my term as the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council this month (January 2015). I feel truly privileged to have this opportunity to serve the biometrics community and continue to build upon the strong foundations laid out by my predecessors. I am indeed fortunate to have the support of an experienced and motivated Executive Council (ExCom) that has already been working tirelessly to realize the vision of the council.

We are now elevated to being a “regular council” making 2014 the most fruitful year since inception. The council has grown steadily and succeeded in introducing a variety of new activities given the collective efforts and dedication of many individuals within and outside the council. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my predecessor Prof. Tieniu Tan for his outstanding contributions in promoting the Council across the various IEEE societies and navigating all the council reviews which eventually earned us the elevated status.

Increasing deployment of biometrics technologies for large scale applications like national identification programs has created new opportunities and challenges for developers, researchers and policy makers. There are high expectations from the biometrics community. Effective new technologies must meet the emerging needs of high security; they must also cater to the needs of the underprivileged for the social good. There is an urgent need to organize key activities and partnerships with stakeholders in the government, academia and industry to meet these expectations. I look forward to working with all of you as we address these issues and create new success stories in our mission to serve the biometrics community.

Venu Govindaraju, President, IEEE Biometrics Council

Fingerprint Algorithm Evaluation: New Report from 30,000 Search Subjects

NIST has released new Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation Report (FpVTE) that describes open-set identification results from fingerprint matching algorithms submitted by 18 different vendors. This evaluation report is based on 30,000 subjects (10,000 mates and 20,000 nonmates) fingerprints and is the first large-scale one-to-many fingerprint evaluation since FpVTE 2003 conducted about a decade ago. Some key results in this report:

• Most accurate submissions achieved miss rate (FNIR) of 1.9% for index fingers, 0.27% for two index fingers, 0.45% for 4-finger and 0.09% 10-finger IDFlats. These numbers are at 0.001 of FPIR and 30,000 search subjects.
• Using more fingers improved accuracy and two-index finger accuracy was better than 4-finger IDFlats.
• The fastest submissions were not most accurate. Accurate submissions could decrease search time with minimal loss in accuracy. The ‘gap’ between the most accurate submissions and ‘next tier’ was much closer than FpVTE 2003.

This evaluation allowed each of the participants to make two submissions per ‘class’ while all the data used was operational data which was not shared with any of the participating vendors. The entire evaluation report (NISTIR 8034) can be freely downloaded from this weblink: http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2014/NIST.IR.8034.pdf

Spotlight: Unique Identification Authority of India

The unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) is leading Adddhar project which is believed to be the largest biometrics based human identification initiative in the world. This project aims to provide a unique identification numbers (Aadhaar) to all the residents of India (~ 1.2 billion people), with priority for underprivileged families who lack proper identification to open bank accounts or access cash subsidies. The uniqueness is ensured by linking the Aadhaar numbers to left and right iris scans, all ten fingerprints and face photograph (along with demographic information such as name, date of birth, gender and address), coupled with a de-duplication process for each new enrolment. and for the underprivileged. The vision of UIDAI is to empower all residents with a unique digital identity and a digital platform to authenticate anytime, anywhere Dr. Vijay S Madan is the Director General and Mission Director of the UIDAI since 1 April 2013. We have asked him few questions whose answers appear in our spotlight section on next page.

The latest full issue of the IEEE Biometrics Council newsletter is available here:

http://ieee-biometrics.org/images/PDF/newsletter_jan_2015.pdf