MINEX Overview

The approval of the INCITS 378 fingerprint template standard creates the possibility of a fully interoperable multivendor marketplace for applications involving fast, economic, and accurate interchange of compact biometric templates. Does the template give accuracy comparable with proprietary (image-based) implementations? Can template data be generated and matched by different vendors without attendant increase in error rates? The MINEX evaluation was designed to answer these questions.

MINEX II - An assessment of Match-on-Card technology

MINEX II is the part of the MINEX program dedicated to the evaluation and development of the capabilities of fingerprint minutia matchers running on ISO/IEC 7816 smart cards. MINEX itself is a program of NIST coordinated development efforts aimed at improving the performance and interoperability of core implementations of the INCITS 378 and ISO/IEC 19794-2 fingerprint minutia standards.

Ongoing MINEX

Continuing testing of INCITS 378 interoperability

The Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX) is an ongoing evaluation of the INCITS 378 fingerprint template. The test program has two mandates:

• To provide measurements of performance and interoperability of core template encoding and matching capabilities to users, vendors and interested parties.
• To establish compliance for template encoders and matchers for the United States Government's Personal Identity Verification (PIV) program.

The purpose of the "Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX 04)" is to determine the feasibility of using minutiae data (rather than image data) as the interchange medium for fingerprint information between different fingerprint matching systems. MINEX 04 is designed to evaluate whether various populations and combinations of encoding schemes, probe templates, gallery templates, and fingerprint matchers will produce successful matches.