International Biometric Performance Testing Conference (IBPC) 2012

In cooperation with the National Physical Laboratory and Fraunhofer IGD, NIST is pleased to announce, as the sequel to the IBPC 2010, an international forum for the discussion of recent advances in the fields of biometric testing, performance definition and specification, and assurance. The conference aims to identify fundamental, relevant, effective, and new performance metrics and to expose best practices for performance evaluation, calibration and design. New performance results are not themselves in scope - instead the intention is to capture relevant and recent quantitative testing, measurement and system-identification techniques to contrast those with the past, and to outline what is needed in the future. The overarching goal is to refine the concept of biometric performance and to ultimately elevate adoption and effectiveness of biometric technologies.

Background

In the context of multifactor authentication, biometrics fill the role of the something you are and their utility rests on the correct analog-to-digital conversion to the particular human characteristic or trait. This is multi-disciplinary in nature and involves biological aspects, human factors, physical sensor technologies, computer vision and signal detection functions, and preparation of compressed, standardized, and viable samples. Thereafter, the algorithmic challenges leading to correct recognition exploit advances in image and signal processing, machine learning, pattern recognition and classification. These steps are often non-trivial and are potential sources of error. Therefore, biometric system performance is in general subject to tradeoffs between sample acceptance at one stage and rejection at a later one.

Prior NIST workshops, in 2006 and 2007, used the term "quality" as a proxy for performance. The goals of those forums was to distinguish quality-by-design from quality-by-practice, and to identify measureable quantities that predict recognition outcome. The 2010 and 2012 International Biometrics Performance Conferences have a broader scope: quantification of all factors that influence performance of the biometric system.