Databases

One of the most important and time-consuming tasks of any biometric system evaluation is the data collection. We have created a multi-database, containing four disjoint fingerprint databases, each collected with a different sensor/technology.

• Four distinct databases, provided by the organizers, will constitute the benchmark: DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4. Each database is 150 fingers wide and 12 samples per finger in depth (i.e., it consists of 1800 fingerprint images). Each database will be partitioned in two disjoint subsets A and B:
  1. subsets DB1-A, DB2-A, DB3-A and DB4-A, which contain the first 140 fingers (1680 images) of DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4, respectively, will be used for the algorithm performance evaluation.
  2. subsets DB1-B, DB2-B, DB3-B and DB4-B, containing the last 10 fingers (120 images) of DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4, respectively, will be made available to the participants as a development set to allow parameter tuning before the submission.
• During performance evaluation, fingerprints belonging to the same database will be matched against each other.
• The image format is BMP, 256 gray-levels, uncompressed.
• The image size and resolution vary depending on the database (detailed information will be available to the participants).
• Data collection in FVC2006 was performed without deliberately introducing difficulties such as exaggerated distortion, large amounts of rotation and displacement, wet/dry impressions, etc. (as it was done in the previous editions), but the population is more heterogeneous and also includes manual workers and elderly people. The volunteers were simply asked to put their fingers naturally on the acquisition device, but no constraints were enforced to guarantee a minimum quality in the acquired images. The final datasets were selected from a larger database by choosing the most difficult fingers according to a quality index, to make the benchmark sufficiently difficult for a technology evaluation.

The FVC2006 databases are a sequestered part of a larger dataset acquired within the European Project BioSec. Images were collected by four different organizations in two different European countries. For more information, please visit http://atvs.ii.uam.es/atvs/fvc2006.html

Terms and Conditions

All publications and works that cite FVC2006 or use the FVC2006 databases must reference the following paper:
R. Cappelli, M. Ferrara, A. Franco and D. Maltoni, "Fingerprint verification competition 2006", Biometric Technology Today, vol.15, no.7-8, pp.7-9, August 2007.