N E W S

• Congratulations to Fulcrum Biometrics, LLC and SBG Labs for each winning a NIST SBIR Phase I award for the topic WS-Biometric Devices (WS-BD) Conformant Handheld Fingerprint Sensor. More detail can be found at the NIST SBIR website.
• At the 2012 Biometric Consortium Conference, September 18-20, 2012, Tampa, Florida, the BWS team will:
• • Demonstrate, at the NIST booth, a reference application that uses WS-Biometric Devices and the NIST WS-BD reference implementation to command and control biometric sensors from a tablet device.
  • Facilitate an OASIS Biometric TC Kickstart meeting which aims to establish a new technical committee (TC) in OASIS that is focused on developing interoperable specifications for biometrics within service oriented environments.
• The .NET WS-BD reference implementation has been updated with a minor bug fix (removal of source repository bindings).
• The BWS website has been redesigned and updated. We have removed the "What have we accomplished so far?" section, and given each individual project a separate section.

This page last updated Tuesday, August 28, 2012

 Join the Biometric Web Services Mailing List

bws@nist.gov is an email list dedicated to an open and public discussion regarding biometrics, web services, service oriented architecture, and related technologies. The list has over 190 members, representing a cross-section of industry, government, and academia.

There are no requirements to join and participate in the discussion; the list is open to all government, industry, and academic organizations as well as individuals. The list will also be used to announce developments at NIST regarding biometric web services projects.

To subscribe to the list, send an email to listproc@nist.gov with the words subscribe bws [your name] in the body.

  Web Services for Biometric Devices (WS-Biometric Devices)

WS-Biometric Devices, or WS-BD, is a new command & control protocol for biometric devices. It uses the language for the web; proprietary knowledge of sensor interfaces are no longer required. Desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone applications can access sensors just as easily as they can navigate to a website.

Specification / NIST Special Publication 500-288

The WS-Biometric Devices specification has been published as NIST Special Publication 500-288.

Download NIST Special Publication 500-288 (PDF, 843 KB)

NIST continually welcomes feedback, comments, and questions on the specification for consideration during updates. Send your comments directly to the WS-Biometric Devices team by emailing 500-288comments@nist.gov.

Reference Implementations

NIST has written two reference implementations against the WS-Biometric Devices specification. To help ensure the quality of the specification, they were developed independently on two different platforms. See the included README files for more information.

Download the 22 August 2012 .NET Reference Implementation (ZIP, 833 KB)

Java Reference Implementation (forthcoming)

The .NET reference implementation has been written in Visual Basic .NET, but is accessible from any .NET programming language. Both implementations include comprehensive integration tests that demonstrate how to use the specification and the implementation.

  Biometric Identity Assurance Services

BIAS defines a framework to deploy and invoke biometric operations, such as enrolling, identifying (comparing one to many), and verifying (comparing one to one) biometric information over a service-oriented architecture. It is designed at a high enough level where it is a very effective and versatile framework that not require or preclude and special biometric modality.

OASIS Standard

The OASIS BIAS TC has developed a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Profile aligning to INCITS 442:2010 – Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS).

The OASIS BIAS SOAP Profile became an official OASIS standard on 24 May 2012.

Reference Implementation

NIST developed a reference implementation to complement the 24 May 2012 standard. There are two components: a service and a client. The service is written in Visual Basic.Net and the client in Adobe Flex. It is a functional service which matches fingerprints using the Bozorth3 algorithm from NBIS.Net.

Reference Implementation (.NET Service /Adobe Flex Client) (ZIP, 10.3 MB)

  Cognitive Modeling & Touchscreen Devices 

ACT-Touch is an extension to the ACT-R cognitive modeling framework. (Link to Act-R leaves NIST and opens in a new window).

ACT-Touch, in combination with ACT-R, establishes a working framework useful for modeling and simulation of human interactions with multitouch display computers. As we build computers that leave behind the traditional desktop environment our cognitive modeling tools must address a different set of human-computer interaction challenges and idioms than are present in desktop computer environments including smaller displays, slower text input due to lack of full-sized physical keyboards, mobility, and direct physical manipulation of interface elements. These are important influences on cognition not typically imposed by a desktop computing environment. ACT-Touch enables modeling cognition situated in such task environments by extending ACT-R with motor movements typically found in multitouch display gestures.

ACT-Touch was developed by Cogscent, LLC under a grant from NIST. (Link to Cogscent leaves NIST and opens in a new window.)

What is ACT-R?

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture: a theory for simulating and understanding human cognition. Researchers working on ACT-R strive to understand how people organize knowledge and produce intelligent behavior. As the research continues, ACT-R evolves ever closer into a system which can perform the full range of human cognitive tasks: capturing in great detail the way we perceive, think about, and act on the world.

From the ACT-R website

  NIST Biometric Image Software for .NET (NBIS.NET)

The NIST Biometric Image Software (NBIS) distribution contains C source code for use in biometrics processing and analysis. NBIS.NET is an interoperability layer that provides a direct in-process interface to the native NBIS libraries directly from .NET.

Download NBIS.NET for NBIS 4.1.0, 21 May 2012 (ZIP 4,888 KB)

The 21 May 2012 version has been updated to support NBIS 4.1.0 and now includes interfaces to access the BOZORTH3 minutiae matching algorithm.

 Retired Projects

The following related projects are not currently undergoing active investigation.

Multimodal Biometric Acquisition Resource Kit

The Multimodal Biometric Acquistion Resource Kit, or MBARK, is a .NET software library for building modern desktop biometric applications that are flexible with respect to changes in sensors, workflow, configuration, and responsiveness. The Biometric Web Services project has deep roots into the MBARK project.

See http://mbark.nist.gov for more information about this project.

ANSI/NIST Parser Generator ("Prism")

"Prism" is a prototype tool developed by NIST to facilitate programmatically reading and biometric file formats that derive from the ANSI/NIST-ITL standard. "Prism" uses code generation to create reading and writing routines specific to a ANSI/NIST variant specified by the user. A simple table contains the metadata and structure of the desired format.

 Download the "Prism" ANSI/NIST Parser Generator (160 KB)