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Information Technology Laboratory / Information Access Division

Image Group

ANSI/NIST-ITL Standard History

The first version of the standard, ANSI/NBS-ICST 1-1986 was published by NIST (formerly the National Bureau of Standards) in 1986. It was a minutiae-based standard. Revisions to the standard were made in 1993, 1997, 2000, and 2007.Updates to the standard are designed to be backward compatible, with new versions including additional biometric modalities and associated data. All of these versions use "Traditional" encoding.

In 2008, XML encoding of the standard was introduced, based upon the 2007 version. The 2007 and 2008 versions of the standard were designed to be the same except for the encoding. The XML encoding was developed using the naming conventions of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). Thus, this encoding is referred to as "NIEM-conformant XML."

In 2009, a minor supplement to the 2007 and 2008 versions was approved that extended the codes for friction ridge images to include multiple finger capture.

In November, 2011 a new version of the standard was approved. This version is focused on the content of the transmission, with encoding rules handled as annexes. Thus, there is no need for separate versions of the standard as was the case for 2007 (Traditional format) and 2008 (NIEM-conformant XML). The 2011 version of the standard also includes additional modalities (DNA and plantar) as well as the extended feature set (EFS) for Type-9 record; forensic image markups for face and iris; new metadata fields such as geoposition of sample collection; biometric data hashing; an information assurance record; associated context record; original source record and data handling logs; images of all body parts in the Type-10 record and more. Current plans are to extend the standard to include records types for voice recognition and dental forensics / bitemark analysis as well as an annex for conformity assessment.

In 2013, the standard was updated to ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011:Update 2013. The Forensic Dental and the Forensic and Investigatory Voice Supplements were approved.

In 2015, the standard was updated to ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011:Update 2015.

Current Standard:

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011:Update 2015 NIST Special Publication 500-290e3 Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial & Other Biometric Information

Prior versions of the ANSI/NIST-ITL Standard

2013

Ansi/NIST-ITL 1-2011 Update: 2013

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011:Update 2013 NIST Special Publication 500-290e2 Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial & Other Biometric Information

2011

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011

NIST Special Publication 500-290 Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial & Other Biometric Information

2007 - 2009

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2007

Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint Facial, & Other Biometric Information - Part 1 (ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2007)

Reference data files(zip file of 30 examples with associated README file)

CTA and CTS for ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2007 - Conformance Testing Information

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2008

Part 2: XML Version (ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2008)

XML files, with NIEM subset. (Remove ActivityAugmentationype and ProtectionOrderAugmentationtype for it to work correctly with JAXB and Java. In this version transactionCategoryCode (TOT) uses an enumeration type for TOTCodeSimpleType and is not substitutable.)

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1a-2009

ANSI/NIST-ITL 1a-2009 addendum to ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2007