MINEX II now has a dedicated MINEX II homepage.
MINEX II is the part of the MINEX program dedicated to the evaluation and development of the capabilities of fingerprint minutia matchers running on ISO/IEC 7816 smart cards. MINEX itself is a program of NIST coordinated development efforts aimed at improving the performance and interoperability of core implementations of the INCITS 378 and ISO/IEC 19794-2 fingerprint minutia standards.
The Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX) is an ongoing evaluation of the INCITS 378 fingerprint template. The test program has two mandates:
The test follows the approach of NIST's MINEX04 test. That program evaluated the products of fourteen vendors and was used in establishing an initial compliance for the PIV program.
The Ongoing MINEX program evaluates template encoding and matching software submitted to NIST in the form of an SDK library. This SDK must implement the MINEX API specification available on this site. This involves, at a minimum, the submission of a SDK that provides functionality to create MINEX compliant templates based on individual fingerprint images. Participants are encouraged to also provide a template matching function.
Participants in the Ongoing MINEX test may optionally submit their products to establish PIV Compliance in accordance with section 7.4.1 of NIST Special Publication 800-76-1 "Biometric Data Specification for Personal Identity Verification"..
Upon completion of MINEX testing, if the submitted SDK meets the performance criteria defined by NIST, it shall be considered MINEX compliant and listed on this site.
Additional information will be posted at this website as it becomes available. Interested parties should send contact information (name, email, telephone) to: minex@nist.gov
The purpose of the "Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX 04)" is to determine the feasibility of using minutiae data (rather than image data) as the interchange medium for fingerprint information between different fingerprint matching systems. MINEX 04 is designed to evaluate whether various populations and combinations of encoding schemes, probe templates, gallery templates, and fingerprint matchers will produce successful matches.
March 22, 2006. An amended version of the MINEX Evaluation Report is online. This includes material incorrectly omitted from the initial March 6 report, see page 4. The following supplemental documents accompany the main report:
A set of briefing slides is also available: MINEX Summary Presentation
Fourteen organizations participated in MINEX 04: