Conformance Testing Methodologies for Biometric Data Interchange Formats, Standardization of

Conformance testing is the method that is used to determine if a product, process or system (known as an implementation under test) satisfies the requirements specified in the base standard. The goal of conformance testing is to capture enough of the requirements of the base standard and test them under enough conditions, that any implementation under test that passes the conformance test is likely to be conformant. Conformance testing provides developers, users, and purchasers with increased levels of confidence in product quality and increases the probability of successful interoperability. Conformance testing methodology standards for data interchange formats identify a language to define the context of conformance testing and conformance claims. These standards include the set of requirements specified in the base standards and one or more conformance test assertions per requirement. There are several efforts in biometric conformance test standardization including U.S. national organizations such as International Committee for Information Technology Standards Technical Committee M1-Biometrics and NIST, who is responsible for the development of the ANSI/NIST-ITL standards; and international organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Joint Technical Commission 1, Subcommittee 37 - Biometrics. The paper includes a description of the different national and international efforts that have taken place in the last few years in the development of conformance testing methodologies for biometric data interchange formats developed by the organizations mentioned above. Content of these standards for both published standards and ongoing projects are addressed.