Washington, D.C. - The NBSP today announced the availability of its latest review of biometric standards activity, “Biometric Standardization 2005 – Status, Progress and Plansâ€. The current report is a follow-on to the reports produced by NBSP in 2004.
Leveraging the ongoing work carried out by NBSP in tracking standards, it contains some of the same introductory material as the first and second report, but relies on the latest update of the NBSP Standards Status spreadsheet (contained in the annexes of the report) to identify the current state of standards. Progress in biometrics standardization since the last report has been significant, especially in the areas of performance and conformance testing, although much work still remains with regards to conformance testing. The report’s biometric standards gap analysis identifies conformance and interoperability testing as the two most important areas for further work.
A significant portion of NBSP funding and effort has been directed to support the development of standards for the manufacture, deployment, and operational integration of the technology. As Chairman and CEO John Siedlarz puts it: “NBSP is not a standards body. Rather, our objective is to reduce the amount of ad hoc efforts that have historically been required to support standards development by providing financial and human resources. Our efforts are focused on accelerating existing work in both domestic and international bodies. In the past two years the number of published standards has more than tripled from 10 to 31. We believe that the support we have provided to standards organizations has contributed to that growth.â€
In addition to the above-referenced report NBSP has:
1. Cosponsored with NIST the development of the recently released BioAPI Conformance Testing Suite (CTS) (2006).
2. Funded development of the Beta version of the Windows CE Reference Implementation Software to support the BioAPI Consortium. The effort entailed "porting" the existing Windows Reference Implementation to execute on the Windows CE platform, further broadening the available environments for standards-based biometric systems. (January 2005).
3. Supported the ILO (International Labor Office) by providing an editor for the international Biometric Profile standard for the Seafarers' Identity Documents program(July 2004 to the present) and by sponsoring the offline follow-on test to the initial ILO Seafarers' Identity Documents Biometric Interoperability Test (February, 2005).
The NBSP is online at www.nationalbiometric.org. Click TRCD Overview, Research and support Services, Standards Support to find the Standards Status Spreadsheet.
