Eye on biometrics

National Institute of Standards and Technology officials will be working on several projects during the next year to ensure that agencies have reliable and accurate technology to measure biometrics. Here are the areas and goals they will focus on:

Fingerprints

Continue independent accuracy tests of vendor and government systems.

Develop guidelines for testing fingerprint readers.

Develop scan quality standards to enhance accuracy.

Face

Examine how different lighting affects face-recognition accuracy.

Investigate reliability and accuracy differences between systems using 2-D and 3-D images.

Iris

Work toward performing accuracy tests by collecting and storing a large enough sample of iris scans.

Multimodal

Collect a large-scale database of face, finger and iris scans.

Perform tests on systems that can scan and search for more than one biometric identifier.