Technical Testing and Evaluation of Biometric Identification Devices

Although the technical evaluation of biometric identification devices has a history spanning over two decades, it is only now that a general consensus on test and reporting measures and methodologies is developing in the scientific community. By “technical evaluation”, we mean the measurement of the five parameters generally of interest to engineers and physical scientists: false match and false non-match rates, binning error rate, penetration coefficient and transaction times. Additional measures, such as “failure to enroll” or “failure to acquire”, indicative of the percentage of the general population unable to use any particular biometric method, are also important. We have not included in this chapter measures of more interest to social scientists, such as user perception and acceptability. Most researchers now accept the “Receiver Operating Characteristic” (ROC) curve as the appropriate measure of the application-dependent technical performance of any biometric identification device. Further, we now agree that the error rates illustrated in the ROC must be normalized to be independent of the database size and other “accept/reject” decision parameters of the test. This chapter discusses the general approach to application-dependent, decision-policy independent testing and reporting of technical device performance and gives an example of one practical test. System performance prediction based on test results is also discussed.