GUC100 Multi-scanner Fingerprint Database for In-House (Semi-Public)
Performance and Interoperability Evaluation
Davrondzhon Gafurov, Patrick Bours, Bian Yang and Christoph Busch
Norwegian Information Security Lab
Gjøvik University College
P.O. Box 191, 2802 Gjøvik, Norway
{Firstname.Lastname}@hig.no
Abstract—In this paper, we describe the GUC100 multi-
scanner fingerprint database that has been created for inde-
pendent and in-house (semi-public) performance and interop-
erability testing of third party algorithms. The GUC100 was
collected by using six different fingerprint scanners (TST, L-1,
Cross Match, PreciseBiometrics, Lumidigm and Sagem). Over
several months fingerprint images of all 10 fingers from 100
subjects on all 6 scanners were acquired. In total, GUC100 con-
tains almost 72.000 fingerprint images. The GUC100 database
enables to evaluate various performances and interoperability
settings by taking into account different influencing factors
such as fingerprint scanner, image quality and so on. The
GUC100 data set is freely available to other researchers and
practitioners provided that they conduct their testing in the
premises of the Gjøvik University College in Norway, or
alternatively submit their algorithms (in compiled form) to run
on GUC100 by researchers in Gjøvik. We applied a commercial
fingerprint verification algorithm on GUC100 and the reported
results indicate that GUC100 is a challenging database.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The two important aspects in performance evaluation
of fingerprint recognition algorithms (and other biometrics
in general) are the availability of independent databases
and desirably testing bodies too. The advantages of such
databases and third party testing bodies are that firstly it
allows more direct and unbiased benchmarking of different
algorithms and secondly it increases a trustworthiness of the
performance report, since developers do not have a direct
access to the database for tuning algorithm’s parameters to
adapt to the database. However, creating and distributing
large scale databases publicly is not an easy task because
of the involved costs and time as well as jurisdictional
limits. Due to the nature of the collected data (i.e. human
physiology), creation and distribution of the large scale
biometric databases raise privacy concerns and may not be
permitted by data protection authorities in some countries
(especially in Europe). Even if data collection is permitted,
usually it is requested to destroy collected data after the
completion of the project, e.g. as in [1].
Nevertheless, in the biometric community several finger-
print databases were established for research purposes [2],
[3], [4], [5], [6]. Previously public databases were provided
by NIST which consists of thousands of fingerprint images
[2]. However, these images are rolled ones i.e. scanned from
inked tenprint paper card. In addition in the context of the
MINEX project NIST composed a large scale fingerprint
data set for in-house testing of algorithms [7]. The database
series FVC200x [3], [4], [5], [6] were designed for the
Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) where several
competing algorithms were tested on them. There are also
some multi-modal databases, where the fingerprint is col-
lected as one of the modalities [8].
This paper describes a multi-scanner fingerprint database,
which has been created for independent and in-house perfor-
mance and interoperability testing. In the rest of the paper,
we will refer to this database as GUC100
1
. In exploitation
of this database we follow - due to privacy regulations in
Norway - the principal of ”If the data cannot travel to the
algorithm then the algorithm shall travel to the data”. This
means that copies of GUC100 database cannot be distributed
to other parties outside of GUC campus. However, algorithm
developers are free to visit GUC and perform training and
testing of their algorithm in its premises, or submit their
(binary code) fingerprint recognition algorithm to GUC
team for testing. The GUC100 database is intended for
technology testing which is an offline evaluation of biometric
components using a pre-existing corpus [9].
Although evaluation of products from a single biometric
supplier is essential from the supplier’s perspective, testing
of scenarios, where products (e.g. sensor, minutia extractor,
minutia comparator) are provided by different suppliers is
very important for both integrators and operators to proof
the interoperability prior to component integration and/or
system roll-out. This refers to the settings where e.g. the
enrolment and verification fingerprint images are acquired
by different capture devices. For instance, in a biometric
passport case, the document issued by a country where the
enrolment image is captured by one scanner shall be able to
be verified by another country where the probe image is very
likely to be acquired by a different scanner. The GUC100
database provides greater potential to evaluate performance
1
GUC stands for Gjøvik University College
2010 International Conference of Computational Science and Its Applications
978-0-7695-3999-7/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICCSA.2010.71
303
2010 International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications
978-0-7695-3999-7/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICCSA.2010.71
303