Background
The first, second and third international competitions on fingerprint verification (FVC2000, FVC2002 and FVC2004) were organized in 2000, 2002 and 2004, 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. Based on the response of the biometrics community, FVC2000, FVC2002 and FVC2004 were undoubtedly successful initiatives. Some key figures and pointers related to these past competitions are summarized in the following table.
| FVC2000 | FVC2002 | FVC2004 | |
| Number of partecipants | 11 4 industrial, 7 academic | 31 21 industrial, 6 academic and 4 other | 43 29 industrial, 6 academic and 8 independent developers |
| Categories | - | - | Open and Light |
| Number of databases and sensors used | 4 Keytronic, ST, Identicator, SFinGe | 4 Identix, Biometrika, Precise Biometrics, SFinGe | 4 CrossMatch, Digital Persona, Atmel, SFinGe |
| All included in the book "Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition" by D. Maltoni, D. Maio, A.K. Jain and S. Prabhakar, Springer NY, 2003. | Freely available online |
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| Results presented | ICPR 2000, September 2000 IEEE Trans. PAMI, March 2002 | ICPR 2002, August 2002 | ICBA 2004, July 2004; IEEE Trans. PAMI, Jan. 2006 |
| Web site | http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2000 | http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2002 | http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2004 |
The interest shown in previous editions by the biometrics research community has prompted the organizers to schedule a new competition for the year 2006.
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 performance evaluation of biometric systems be carried out at regular intervals.
- The aim of FVC2006 is to track recent advances in fingerprint verification, for both academia and industry, and to benchmark the state-of-the-art in fingerprint technology.
- Further testing, on interoperability and quality related issues, will be performed in a second stage, after the competition is completed.
- This competition should not be viewed as an "official" performance certification of biometric systems, since 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, from the industry, or independent developers.
- Anonymous participation will be accepted: participants will be allowed to decide whether or not they want to publish their names together with their algorithm’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.
- Together with their submissions, participants will be required to provide some general, high-level information about their algorithms (similar to those reported in FVC2004, see [R. Cappelli, D. Maio, D. Maltoni, J.L. Wayman and A.K. Jain, “Performance Evaluation of Fingerprint Verification Systems”, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis Machine Intelligence, January 2006]). Whilst this required information will not disclose industrial secrets, since it is a very high level description of the approaches, it could be of interest to the entire fingerprint community.
- Organizers of FVC2006 will not participate in the contest.
