BiomDI - Software Tools supporting Standard Biometric Data Interchange Formats

Utilities for processing of biometric data conformant to INCITS and ISO standards

This page documents NIST's Biom DI project to develop and disseminate open-source software for handling records specified in INCITS and ISO biometric data format standards.

  • INCITS 378 - Fingerprint Minutia Data
  • INCITS 381 - Fingerprint Image Data
  • INCITS 385 - Face Image Data
  • ISO/IEC 19794-2 - Fingerprint Minutia Data
These standards were developed in

Some INCITS biometric standards have been adopted for use in various government programs including the Personal Identity Verification of Federal Employees and Contractors program developed by NIST. Their use is specified in NIST Special Publication 800-76. NIST anticipates that the code may be useful to technology providers and systems' integrators seeking a cross check with their own implementations of PIV and PIV related programs, and in other applications.

Source Code

The source code is written in ISO C and is maintained on the Image Group's open source server, NIGOS. This machine runs Perforce*, a software version control system. Its server must be accessed using the Perforce client which is freely available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS and other platforms. To access the code please follow these instructions. Version control is used because the software remains under development - it should be regarded as a beta release.

A compressed zip archive of the source code is updated nightly. Users electing to download the source code in this form will not receive notification of software revisions and are likely to have an out-of-date copy very quickly. NIST is eager to avoid unknown and undocumented bifurcation of the code amongst users and we therefore strongly recommend organizations to run Perforce as their default method of access. The zip archive is really intended for preview purposes only.

Please note that the software distribution contains neither sample images nor formatted records. NIST has released such data separately in October 2006.

Future Work and Collaboration

This suite of utilities is under development and is subject to change.

NIST would be grateful to organizations willing to contribute analogous code for the biometric data records specified in other parts of the data interchange format standards, both within the US (INCITS 396 Hand Geometry Interchange Format, for example) and internationally (ISO/IEC 19794-6, Iris Image Interchange Format, for example).

Contributions and comments are welcome and should be directed to the technical contacts Wayne Salamon and Patrick Grother. Patches to our code can only be accepted after review and testing.

License

This software was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by employees of the Federal Government in the course of their official duties. Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this software is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain. NIST assumes no responsibility whatsoever for use by other parties of its source code or open source server, and makes no guarantees, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic.

Disclaimer

* Specific software products identified here are used in order to perform the code management tasks at hand. However, in no case does identification of any commercial product, trade name, or vendor, imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the products and equipment identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose.