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BiomDI - Software tools supporting Standard Biometric Data Interchange Formats
This page documents NIST software for handling records specified in several biometric data format standards. These are the INCITS 378-2004 and ISO/IEC 19794-2:2005 (finger minutiae), INCITS 381-2004 and ISO/IEC 19794-4:2004 (finger image), and INCITS 385-2004 (face recognition format). The American National Standards were developed in the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Technical Committee M1 - Biometrics. The International standards were developed by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 37 committee.
INCITS biometric standards have been adopted for use in various government programs including the Personal Identity Verification of Federal Employees and Contractors program developed by NIST. Their use is specified in NIST Special Publication 800-76-1. NIST anticipates that the code may be useful to technology providers and systems' integrators seeking a cross check with their own implementations of PIV and PIV related programs, and in other applications.
The distribution contains the following utilities. They are built on top of libraries dedicated to the base INCITS and ISO/IEC" standards.
INCITS 378-2004 ISO 19794-2 2005-09-15 - Finger Minutiae Format for Data Interchange
- libfmr - core library for construction, reading and writing of biometric data records specified in INCITS/ISO standards
- prfmr - dumps the record to stdout and (with -v flag) checks conformance to generic un-profiled biometric data records specified in INCITS/ISO standards
- minexv/minexov/minex2v - checks conformance of a INCITS 378 record to the MINEX04, Ongoing MINEX, MINEX III and MINEX-II test profiles.
- mkfmr - prepares an INCITS 378 record from (x,y,theta) text information
- fmrplot - overlays an INCITS 378 minutiae record onto its parent grayscale fingerprint image
- an2k2fmr - converts an ANSI/NIST record to an INCITS 378 record
- fmr2an2k - and reverse this conversion
INCITS 385-2004 - Face Recognition Format for Data Interchange
- libfrf - core library for construction, reading and writing of biometric data records specified in INCITS 385
- cpfrf - copies and checks conformance of a biometric data record specified in INCITS 385
- mkfrf -prepares an INCITS 385 sample from a JPEG image and metadata
- prfrf - dumps an INCITS 385 record to stdout, and optionally checks its conformance
INCITS 381-2004 ISO/IEC 19794-4:2004 - Finger Image-Based Data Interchange Format
- libfir - core library for construction, reading and writing of biometric data records specified in INCITS/ISO standards
- prfir - dumps the record to stdout and (with -v flag) checks conformance to biometric data records specified in INCITS/ISO standards
- mkfrf -prepares an INCITS 381 sample from raster images and associated metadata
- pgm2fir - convert a single PGM raster to an INCITS 381 record. (C++)
ISO/IEC 19794-6 - Iris Image Data
- under development libiid core library for construction, reading and writing of biometric data records specified in ISO/IEC 19794-6 20xx. priibdb - print the ISO/IEC 19794-6 records contained in a file to standard out iibdbv - verifies the conformance of records contained in a file to the ISO/IEC 19794-6 standard
Please note that the software distribution contains neither sample images nor formatted records. NIST has released such data separately in October 2006.
Future Work and Collaboration
This suite of utilities is under development and is subject to change. Note that this software partially supports data formatted according to biometric data records specified in analogous international standards ISO/IEC 19794-{2,4,5}. The fingerprint minutiae and image libraries support ISO/IEC 19794-2/19794-4, but many of the apps do not. Face image containers ISO/IEC 19794-5 are not supported. NIST would welcome contributions toward this end. The use of the open source server supports cooperative development and NIST will give developers their own branches from which code may be integrated into the mainline. NIST would be grateful to organizations willing to contribute analogous code for the biometric data records specified in other parts of the data interchange format standards, both within the US (INCITS 396 Hand Geometry Interchange Format, for example) and internationally (ISO/IEC 19794-6, Iris Image Interchange Format, for example).
Contributions and comments are welcome and should be directed to the technical contacts Wayne Salamon and Patrick Grother. Patches to our code will only be accepted after review and testing.