Biometric Sensor Interoperability: A Case Study in Fingerprints

The problem of biometric sensor interoperability has received limited attention in the literature. Most biometric systems operate under the assumption that the data (viz., images) to be compared are obtained using the same sensor and, hence, are restricted in their ability to match or compare biometric data originating from different sensors. Although progress has been made in the development of common data exchange formats to facilitate the exchange of feature sets between vendors, very little effort has been invested in the actual development of algorithms and techniques to match these feature sets. In the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC 2002), for example, the evaluation protocol only matched images originating from the same sensor although fingerprint data from 3 different commercial sensors was available. This is an indication of the difficulty in accommodating sensor interoperability in biometric systems. In this paper we discuss this problem and present a case study involving two different fingerprint sensors.