FAQ
Question: What is the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC)?
Answer:
The FVC (Fingerprint Verification Competition) is the world’s largest competition for fingerprint verification algorithms and is organized every tow years by the University of Bologna (Italy) ), the State University of San Jose (EUA), State University of Michigan (EUA) and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain).. The last FVC took place at fall of 2006 with seventy algorithms submitted by fifty three industry and academic participants. FVC applies algorithms over four databases of fingerprint images from multiple sources and computes a set of biometrics parameters describing its accuracy and performance behavior. Each of four image database has diverse quality and characteristics depending of the source sensor type. The FVC 2006 databases were obtained from the following sources:
- Database 1: Electric field sensor.
- Database 2: Optical sensor.
- Database 3: Thermal sweeping sensor.
- Database 4: Artificial images from SFinGe v 3.0 software.
Figure 1 shows an image example from each database. Note the diversity on size, background, grey levels variation, contrast and papillae properties.
Figure 1: Examples of images from FVC 2006 fingerprint databases 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively.
FVC has two categories: Open and Light. Light category imposes strong limits to fingerprint processing time, memory use and template size. Open category limits basically the fingerprint processing time for a viable commercial algorithm.
