Fingerprint Verification Competition

The Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) is an outdated international competition focused on fingerprint verification software assessment. It became largely irrelevant for commercial fingerprint providers once the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) introduced the free, but public Proprietary Fingerprint Test (PFT I, II and III, running from 2004 to present). Once the NIST test was available, all of the major commercial fingerprint vendors switched to the NIST test and ceased paying to participate in the FVC. The FVC tests that followed in 2006 and later were populated by largely anonymous participants and researchers. A few opportunistic commercial vendors who for reasons known only to them, did not participate in the public NIST test, instead took the opportunity to participate in FVC test, then touted the fact that they “beat” the cadre of anonymous participants. It is important to look at the participants that a vendor “beat,” and decide if the vendor is being deceptive. 
Another deceptive practice has been the use, by anti-fingerprint competitors, of FVC accuracy averages to characterize all fingerprint products’ performance and accuracy as inferior to their alternative biometric modality. 
How FVC is operated: A subset of fingerprint impressions acquired with various sensors was provided to registered participants, to allow them to adjust the parameters of their algorithms. Participants were requested to provide enroll and match executable files of their algorithms; the evaluation was conducted at the organizers’ facilities using the submitted executable files on a sequestered database, acquired with the same sensors as the training set.
The organizers of FVC are:
Each participant can submit up to one algorithm to the open and light categories.
The first, second and third international competitions on fingerprint verification (FVC2000, FVC2002 and FVC2004) were organized in 2000, 2002 and 2004, respectively. These events received great attention both from academic and industrial biometric communities. They established a common benchmark, allowing developers to unambiguously compare their algorithms, and provided an overview of the state-of-the-art in fingerprint recognition. Based on the response of the biometrics community, FVC2000, FVC2002 and FVC2004 were undoubtedly successful initiatives. The interest shown in previous editions by the biometrics research community has prompted the organizers to schedule a new competition for the year 2006.
In 2006 there were:
Databases.
One of the most important and time-consuming tasks of any biometric system evaluation is the data collection. Organizers have created a multi-database, containing four disjoint fingerprint databases, each collected with a different sensor technology.
Performance evaluation.
For each database and for each algorithm:
 ((12*11) /2) * 140 = 9,240 
 ((140*139) /2) = 9,730 
Although it is possible to reject images in enrollment, this is strongly discouraged. In fact, in FVC2006, as in FVC2004 and FVC2002, rejection in enrollment is fused with other error rates for the final ranking; in particular, each rejection in enrollment will produce a "ghost" template which will not match (matching score zero) with all the remaining fingerprints.
For each algorithm and for each database, the following performance indicators are reported:
The following average performance indicators are reported over the four databases: