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>> Please look at the blue light.
>> Narrator: Easily
and accurately ascertaining the identity
of individuals is what Biometric Systems are all about.
They do that "identifying" based
on physiological characteristics like-- but not limited to--
fingerprints, iris patterns, or facial features.
Given today's ever-escalating security and safety challenges,
the application of those technologies has
greatly expanded.
Now extensively used by the government
and the private sector,
biometric systems are a significant component
of the essential and ongoing effort
to safeguard the United States and its people.
It is imperative that biometric systems be continually
and innovatively improved as their applications are widened.
That is precisely what scientists
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology--
or N.I.S.T.-- are doing!
Partnering with the Department of Homeland Security,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
and virtually every other agency that has biometrics
as a core part of its mission,
they are putting NIST's long experience in the field
of human identification systems to good use.
>> Michael D. Garris: NIST has been working in the area
of biometrics for over 40 years.
With the events of nine-eleven, we all had a wake-up call
and realized that Homeland Security needed
to be greatly improved
and biometric technologies was identified
as a key enabling technology.
And so, with our track record, we found ourselves very quickly
in the middle of a government-wide effort
to collect more biometrics, higher quality biometrics,
to share that data appropriately across agencies and to make sure
that the systems that are in place are accurate and reliable.
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In regards to biometrics, security
and safety, they go hand in hand.
And so, biometrics, they're used for controlling access
to a facility, securing a facility, protecting access
to computer networks, combating fraud, fighting crime,
screening people at borders.
And in terms of safety, biometrics can help
with identity management for people like first responders
at the scene of natural disasters, for the soldier
in theater, for border patrol,
and for the police officer on the street.
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Biometric standards and their guidance are vital
to build effective biometric systems.
And the standards that we work on help to provide open exchange
of data between agencies and their systems which are built
by different companies.
It also helps to define methods
for performance testing...and then one really important aspect
of biometric standards is interoperability.
And in other words, making sure
that all the government's biometric systems work
well together.
And beyond that, standards are good for commerce.
They result in greater innovation by private industry
and they help to lower barriers
for new companies to enter the market.
The activities that we're highlighting today are a few
of many activities that are going
on in biometrics at N.I.S.T.
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>> Dr. Ross J. Micheals: Originally, we were approached
by the Transportation Security Administration-- TSA--
and they needed to collect some irises
for iris recognition evaluation.
When you're doing a data collection,
the sensors are pretty cheap.
Right? It's the time that you get people to come in,
present their biometrics, explain to everybody,
so there's a large investment.
So, it turned out, well, if we're taking irises,
let's take face, as well, and, oh, if you're taking iris
and face, might as well take fingerprint, too.
And what happened was we realized
that there really isn't anything out there that would allow us
to easily choose different vendors,
different manufacturers, different sensors,
so we built it ourselves.
>> Narrator: What they built was a set of software libraries
from which people could create advanced multimodal biometric
applications with a range of benefits--
including a very surprising one.
>> Dr. Ross J. Micheals: A major advantage of MBARK is
that its public domain...anyone can take these libraries
and do anything they want with it.
They can commercialize it.
They can put it into a product.
It's often used in research, labs all across,
actually all across the world.
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>> Mary Frances Theofanos: Biometric usability is the study
of biometric systems so that we can understand the extent
to which, how users use a product with efficiency,
effectiveness, and user satisfaction
to achieve their goals in a specified context of use.
>> Narrator: That "context of use" is obvious
at U.S. ports of entry.
There, NIST research has strongly impacted how US--
VISIT is implemented.
Especially in taking fingerprints.
>> Mary Frances Theofanos: Height angle research has led
to US-VISIT angling the scanners on all of their counters
in all of their airports.
>> Narrator: This adjustment in the fingerprint-taking process,
one of many adjustments suggested by N.I.S.T.
after careful study, has resulted in making
that process more convenient for both visitors and Customs
and Border Patrol Officers.
It has also improved the quality of the fingerprint image.
Another result of N.I.S.T. research was the simplifying
of critical instruction symbols and pictograms pertaining
to the fingerprint process.
In a situation where most visitors don't speak English,
these had to be both perfectly clear and culturally sensitive.
>> Mary Frances Theofanos: And in many cultures,
hand signals can mean so many different things and have
such cultural differences and so we have to be so careful
with hand gestures and so fingerprint symbols can be
so culturally sensitive that we really had to study this issue
and come down with very precise pictograms and symbols
to define these individual steps.
Before we had way too much information,
way too many abstract pictograms,
and so we've greatly simplified our symbols
and now we've really increased throughput tremendously
because we've just simplified the whole process.
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>> Michael Indovina: There's two major varieties of fingerprints.
There's latent fingerprints and conventional fingerprints.
Latent fingerprints are collected forensically off
of surfaces, off from residual marks on surfaces.
Conventional fingerprints are directly captured
from fingers using ink or live-scan devices.
Latent fingerprints tend to have less area and lesser quality
than conventional fingerprints
which makes them harder to match.
>> Narrator: Whether conventional
or latent fingerprints, agencies like the F.B.I.
and Homeland Security want to capture and match them faster,
more accurately and with less human intervention in order
to both apprehend more criminals
and stop terrorists before they can enter the country.
Scientists at N.I.S.T. are evaluating fingerprint-matching
technologies designed to do just that.
Their work has wide-ranging benefits!
>> Michael Indovina: In my view, when you conduct evaluations
of technology in an open manner,
you're actually stimulating improvements to that technology,
you're promoting competition in the marketplace,
and you're informing the consumer of those technologies.
By evaluating these technologies
and ranking them you're allowing government agencies
such as Homeland Security or F.B.I.
to make better purchasing decisions.
We're also putting out a lot of detailed information
about the characteristics of these technologies
so when they do put these into operation,
they can use them in an optimal way.
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>> Elham Tabassi: Biometric sample quality,
the way we define it, is about the matchability
of a biometric sample.
A sample is of good quality if it can be matched correctly
and the expected recognition error
of a good quality sample is low.
A sample is a bad quality if it results
in a higher recognition error.
>> Narrator: Fundamentally, then,
the key to biometric systems effectively carrying
out their function is the quality of the captured image.
Assessing that quality--
and developing standards for such assessment--
plays a vital role in improving the performance
of biometric systems, in improving their accuracy
and efficiency during the capture process.
This, in turn, leads to greater system-level accuracy
in national databases so critical
to the nation's security.
>> Elham Tabassi: If quality can be improved,
either by sensor design or by better capture conditions
or by compliance to some standards,
better performance can be achieved.
>> Narrator: For those aspects of quality
that cannot be designed in,
a mechanism to measure quality is necessary.
>> Elham Tabassi: There is a need for standardized
and interoperable way of measuring
and exchanging quality scores and that has been the bulk
and the focus of the biometric quality program
at N.I.S.T. We have been working
with international standard organizations
to develop standards for sharing and measuring quality scores.
>> Narrator: These are just samplings
of the biometric activities of NIST scientists.
There are many others.
All are aimed at developing, honing, testing,
and evaluating biometric standards and systems.
And, all help ensure that taxpayer dollars spent
on biometrics deliver accurate, reliable systems that work
to keep this country and its citizens safe.
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