Background
The first and second international competitions on fingerprint verification (FVC2000 and FVC2002) were organized in 2000 and 2002, respectively. These events received great attention both from academic and industrial biometric communities. They established a common benchmark allowing developers to unambiguously compare their algorithms, and provided an overview of the state-of-the-art in fingerprint recognition. FVC2000 and FVC2002 were undoubtedly successful initiatives:
| FVC2000 | FVC2002 | |
| Numerber of partecipants | 11 4 industrial, 7 academic | 31 21 industrial, 6 academic and 4 other |
| A posteriori evaluations | 3 | 1 |
| Number of databases and sensors used | 4 Keytronic, ST, Identicator, SFinGe | 4 Identix, Biometrika, PreciseB., SFinGe |
| All included in the book "Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition" by D. Maltoni, D. Maio, A.K. Jain and S. Prabhakar, Springer NY, 2003. | ||
| Results presented | ICPR 2000, September 2000 IEEE Trans. PAMI, March 2002 | ICPR 2002, August 2002 |
| Web site | http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2000 | http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2002 |
The interest shown in FVC2000 and FVC2002 by the biometrics research community has prompted the organizers to schedule a new competition for 2004.
Aim
Continuous advances in the field of biometric systems and, in particular, in fingerprint-based systems (both in matching techniques
and sensing devices) require that the performance evaluation of biometric systems be carried out at regular intervals..
The aim of FVC2004 is to track recent advances in fingerprint verification, for both academia and industry, and to benchmark
the state-of-the-art in fingerprint technology.
This competition should not be viewed as an “official” performance certification of biometric systems, since:
- the databases used in this contest have not been necessarily acquired in a real-world application environment and are not collected according to a formal protocol.
- only parts of the system software will be evaluated by using images from sensors not native to each system.
Nonetheless, the results of this competition will give a useful overview of the state-of-the-art in this field and will provide guidance to the participants for improving their algorithms.
Participants
- Participants can be from academia or industry.
- Anonymous participation will be accepted: participants will be allowed to decide whether or not to publish their names together with their system's performance. Participants will be confidentially informed about the performance of their algorithm before they are required to make this decision. In case a participant decides to remain anonymous, the label "Anonymous organization" will be used, and the real identity will not be revealed.
- Organizers of FVC2004 will not participate in the contest.
