Ongoing MINEX

Ongoing MINEX has been superseded by MINEXIII

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 test follows the approach of NIST's MINEX04 test. That program evaluated the products of fourteen vendors and was used in establishing an initial compliance for the PIV program.

The Ongoing MINEX program evaluates template encoding and matching software submitted to NIST in the form of an SDK library. This SDK must implement the MINEX API specification available on this site. This involves, at a minimum, the submission of a SDK that provides functionality to create MINEX compliant templates based on individual fingerprint images. Participants are encouraged to also provide a template matching function.

Participants in the Ongoing MINEX test may optionally submit their products to establish PIV Compliance in accordance with sections 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5 of NIST Special Publication 800-76-1 "Biometric Data Specification for Personal Identity Verification" .

Upon completion of MINEX testing, if the submitted SDK meets the performance criteria defined by NIST, it shall be considered MINEX compliant and listed on this site.