Background

Performance evaluation is important for all biometric modalities and particularly so for fingerprint recognition, which is receiving widespread attention for citizen identity verification and identification in large-scale applications. Unambiguously and reliably assessing the current state of the fingerprint recognition technology is mandatory for understanding its limitations and addressing future research.

After the success of the first four fingerprint verification competitions (FVC2000, FVC2002, FVC2004 and FVC2006), the Biometric System Laboratory (University of Bologna) decided to organize a new online evaluation campaign for fingerprint recognition technologies: FVC-onGoing. FVC-onGoing offers web-based automatic evaluation of fingerprint recognition algorithms on a set of sequestered datasets, reporting results using well known performance indicators and metrics.

While previous FVC initiatives were organized as “competitions”, with specific calls and fixed time frames, FVC-onGoing is:

• an “on going competition” always open to new participants;
• an evolving online repository of evaluation metrics and results.

Furthermore FVC-onGoing performance evaluation is not only limited to fingerprint verification algorithms: ad hoc metrics and datasets for testing specific modules of fingerprint verification systems are available. This allows to better understand the limits and the challenges not only of the whole recognition problem, but also of its modules (e.g. feature extractor, matcher), with clear benefits for researchers and algorithms’ developers.