Characterizing minutia extractors for semantic conformance testing

Recent effort has been expended toward the development of a methodology for semantic conformance testing of standardized biometric interchange records. Specifically, the primary motivation is to evaluate the degree to which a generated compact interchange record such as a minutia template is a faithful representation of the original digital representation of the biométrie characteristic (i.e. image of a finger pattern). In and of itself, such an evaluation would seem to have intrinsic value, as it is almost obvious that this would be of paramount importance to fingerprint minutia extractors. However, in this paper, we provide empirical data that suggests some caution in coming to such a conclusion. We also propose several other approaches to evaluating minutia extractors that might augment their characterization for the purpose of comparison and evaluation.