Summary of NIST Patriot Act Recommendations 

1. One-to-One Matching (Verification) -- NIST recommends one face and two index 

fingerprints for verification. All three biometrics should be in image form. The face 

image should conform to the ANSI/INCITS 385-2004 standard. The fingerprint 

images should conform to the ANSI/INCITS 381-2004 standard with 500 dots per 

inch (dpi) scan resolution. 

2. One-to-Many Matching (Identification) -- NIST recommends ten slap fingerprint 

images stored in type 14 ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2000 formatted records for enrollment 

and checking of large databases. Face images are not recommended for identification 

applications. With available fingerprint scanning technology, the acquisition of 10 

slap fingerprints should take only slightly more time than the acquisition of two flat 

fingerprints. 

Both of these recommendations are identical to the recommendations made in the joint 

report to Congress titled “Use of Technology Standards and Interoperable Databases with 

Machine-Readable, Tamper-Resistant Travel Documents” [1] dated February 2003. Since 

this report was issued, extensive testing of biometric systems has been carried out by 

NIST that continue to support these recommendations. 

VERIFICATION 

For verification applications, the conclusions of the report sent to Congress dealing with 

the comparison of face and fingerprint accuracy should be updated in light of the 

following. First, NIST has recently found that the NIST-developed fingerprint matcher 

[2] is substantially less accurate than commercial systems. Second, the data used for tests 

in the report has lower quality than the data presently being collected by the US-VISIT 

program. Third, the face images used in these tests [3] are of higher quality than those in 

most operational government data sets. 

When all these factors are combined, the comparison of face and fingerprint accuracy 

needs to be revised [4]. Contemporary fingerprint systems are substantially more 

accurate than face recognition systems. This conclusion holds even for face and 

fingerprint images categorized as high quality. This should be qualified by the 

observation that any advances in face recognition technology since the Face Recognition 

Vendor Test (FRVT) [3] have yet to be evaluated. 

The two-fingerprint accuracy (or true accept rate (TAR)) at 0.1% false accept rate (FAR) 

for the US-VISIT two fingerprint matching system [4] is 99.6% while the best 2002 face 

recognition TAR at 1% FAR was 90% using controlled illumination [4]. When outdoor 

illumination was used in 2002 [3], the best TAR at 1% FAR was 54%. Even under 

controlled illumination, which is not currently used in US-VISIT, the error rate of face 

recognition is 25 times higher than the two-fingerprint results using US-VISIT data [4] 

that has 10 times lower FAR. If the case of uncontrolled illumination is considered, this 

factor would be 115. This means that face recognition is useful only for those cases 

where fingerprints of adequate quality cannot be obtained. The fingerprint matching 
accuracy achieved with two fingers by US-VISIT is the best that can be achieved with 

current verification technology [5]. 

IDENTIFICATION 

For identification applications, extensive testing on COTS fingerprint systems has 

confirmed the requirement for ten slap fingerprints. Eighteen different companies’ 

products were tested, and thirty-four systems were evaluated [6]. Different data subtests 

measured accuracy for various numbers and types of fingerprints, using operational 

fingerprint data from a variety of U.S. Government sources. 48,105 sets of fingerprints 

(393,370 distinct fingerprint images) from 25,309 individuals were used for analysis. 

For all systems, the accuracy increases as the number of fingers increase. The 

improvement is both large and consistent. Although the actual benefits were found to 

vary by dataset and by system, the general trend was quite consistent. The accuracy of 

searches using four or more fingers was higher than the accuracy of two finger searches, 

which was higher than the accuracy of single-finger searches. 

These results are strongly dependent on fingerprint image quality. For the US-VISIT 

fingerprint matching system, using Department of State (DOS) Mexican visa Border 

Crossing Card (BCC) data, the true accept rate (TAR) using index finger pairs is 

independent of background database size over the range from 100,000 entries to 

6,000,000 entries. Using the operational thresholds of (1300, 1880), the TAR is 96% 

[4]. If however image quality rather that database size is the controlling factor, then for 

low quality data, Cogent image quality 8 (the lowest image quality identified by the 

Cogent matcher), the TAR falls to 53.6%. With high quality images, Cogent image 

quality 1, the TAR is 99.6%. Image quality is important since the image quality of most 

archival law enforcement databases is lower than the image quality of the data presently 

being collected by US-VISIT and will remain so for some time into the future. The only 

tested method for improving matching accuracy for databases with lower image quality is 

to increase the number of fingers used. Typical 10-finger true accept rate (TAR) for the 

most accurate COTS system tested exceeded 99.95% at a false accept rate (FAR) of 

0.01% [6]. 

REFERENCES 

[1] “Use of Technology Standards and Interoperable Databases with Machine-Readable, 

Tamper-Resistant Travel Documents – Appendix A;” PDF document at 

http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.03/fing/fing.html; November 2002. 

[2] C L Wilson, C I Watson, M D Garris, A Hicklin; “Studies of Fingerprint Matching 

Using the NIST Verification Test Bed (VTB)” NISTIR 7020; National Institute of 

Standards and Technology; Gaithersburg Maryland; 07 July 2003 

[3] P. J. Phillips, P. Grother, R. J. Micheals, D. M. Blackburn, E. Tabassi, and M. Bone, 

‘Face recognition vendor test 2002, NIST IR 6965, National Institute of Standards & 

Technology, Gaithersburg Maryland, March 2003. 
[4] C. L. Wilson, M. D. Garris, and C. I. Watson, Matching Performance for the USVISIT IDENT System Using Flat Fingerprints, NISTIR 7110, National Institute of 

Standards and Technology, (May 2004). 

[5] C. Watson, C. Wilson, K. Marshall, M. Indovina, R. Snelick, Studies of one-to-one 

fingerprint matching with vendor SDK matchers, NISTIR 7119, National Institute of 

Standards and Technology, (May, 2004). 

[6] C.L. Wilson, R. Austin Hicklin, Harold Korves, Bradford Ulery, Melissa Zoepfl, 

Mike Bone, Patrick Grother, Ross Micheals. Steve Otto and, Craig Watson, Fingerprint 

vendor technology evaluation 2003: summary of results and analysis report, NISTIR 

7123, National Institute of Standards and Technology, (June 2004).