Interoperability in fingerprint recognition: A large-scale empirical study

Biometric systems are widely deployed in governmental, military and commercial/civilian applications. There are a multitude of sensors and matching algorithms available from different vendors. This creates a competitive market for these products, which is good for the consumers but emphasizes the importance of interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of a biometric system to handle variations introduced in the biometric data due to the deployment of different capture devices. The use of different biometric devices may increase error rates. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study of the status of interoperability between fingerprint sensors and assess the performance consequence when interoperability is lacking.