NIST Contributions to Biometric Technology

NIST has been at the forefront of IT applications to biometrics and identity management for almost 50 years. Early work revolved around developing hardware and software to automate the analysis of fingerprint images and to develop speech-recognition capabilities. As the biometrics industry grew, NIST developed publicly available datasets and testing procedures for evaluating the performance of academic and commercial algorithms and equipment. These efforts have included giving researchers and vendors self-assessment tools to spur innovation. In addition, NIST developed challenges and evaluations using sequestered data with publicly published results. The standardization of data interchange and the development of best-practice guidelines as well as data-quality evaluation tools have been essential in NIST´s work to foster reliability, fidelity, and accuracy in biometric data processing. This article is part of a special issue on NIST contributions to IT.