Motivation and Use Cases for NFIQ 2.0 

Oliver Bausinger 

Federal Office for Information Security 

Section 

Inspection Infrastructures and Architectures 

IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page: 1 
 

 

 

 

 

IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Status 

• Official documents with fingerprints 

• European ePassports 

• European Residence Permits 

• Identity Cards (partially) 

• European Visa Information System (VIS) 

• Tenprints from all Schengen (short-time) Visa applicants 

• Data stored for 5 years 

• Target size up to 100 Mio. records 

• Biometric verification will soon be mandatory at all Schengen border checks 

• Criminal AFIS 

• Future RTP programs might use fingerprints 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Challenges in fingerprint 

biometrics deployment 

• Problems 

• Technical 

• Heterogenous environments 

• Different software vendors and versions 

• Interoperability issues 

• Organizational 

• Multiple enrolment processes have to be conducted by the same operator 

• System design 

• At enrolment stage, typically the biometric verification or identification system 

vendor is unknown 

• Large scale identification scenarios (AFIS) have immensly high quality 

requirements 

• Garbage in, garbage out! 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Challenges in fingerprint 

biometrics deployment (2) 

• Timing considerations 

• Timing constraints are the biggest driver in the design of an enrolment and 

verification process 

• For many instances, quality correlates directly with time 

• No only technical, but als organizational, e.g. user guidance 

• Time is expensive 

• Officers are expensive 

• Room is expensive 

• Which quality is required by the system? 

• How much time (on average) do I need to reach the desired level? 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Stages of possible quality control 

• Scanner level 

• Hardware built-in auto capture 

• Hard to tweak to a specific application scenario 

• Capture software level 

• Beyond the vendor SDK 

• Run things like NFIQ, vendor software kits, other QA algorithms 

• Implement target system specific thresholds 

• Process level 

• A background system rejects the fingerprints 

• Trigger recapture only when necessary 

• Avoid this as often as possible because of timing considerations, especially 

when round trips to central systems are involved 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Problem statement 

• There‘s no common understanding of a term like fingerprint of 

sufficient quality 

• Sufficient for which application? 

• Quality requirements differ a lot for different applications (e.g obviously between 1:1 

and 1:n) 

• But, you say, there‘s quality in the standards. 

• An algorithm should produce a value in [0, 100]. 

• Most don‘t. 

• And even if, those scores are not calibrated to an accepted base line. 

• And even if, there‘s no consense on any kind of thresholds for specific 

applications 

• OK, let‘s try again ... 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Problem statement (2nd try) 

• There‘s no common language to establish an interoperable definition of 

fingerprint of sufficient quality for a specific application scenario 

• When developing an application scenario, define a common understanding of the 

required image quality 

• We need the language for doing this 

• And we need a baseline tool for doing this 

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Expectations for the future 

IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

• NFIQ 2 will be good enough to be used as baseline tool for defining 

fingerprint of sufficient quality 

• NFIQ 2 will be the calibration base for vendor QA tools 

• Vendor QA tools will not go away, but – at least – for large scale applications will be 

comparable (statistically, not on a by-image-basis) to NFIQ 2 

• Vendor QA tools should not have a need to augment NFIQ 2 itself, but it should be 

sufficient for a vendor to define a specific threshold for a specific application 

• NFIQ 2 will be used in all major fingerprint-based biometrics systems. 

• Of course, the term of fingerprint quality will not be stable, but the 

biometric community will have a way to adapt, refine, reformulate it 

according to the evolution of fingerprint technology 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page:

Questions 

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IBPC 2012 / Satellite Workshop on NIFQ 2.0 

NIST Gaithersburg, March 5, 2012 

Oliver Bausinger Page: 10

Contact 

Federal Office for Information Security 

Inspection Infrastructures and Architectures 

Oliver Bausinger 

oliver.bausinger@bsi.bund.de