Environmental Testing Methodology in Biometrics

Abstract

Recently, biometrics is used in many security systems and these systems can be located in different environments. As many experts claim and previous works have demonstrated, environmental conditions influence biometric performance. Nevertheless, there is not a specific methodology for testing this influence at the moment. Due to it is essential to carry out this kind of evaluations, a new ISO standard was proposed for regularizing them. Such standard was accepted and it has to be specified now.

In this work, authors have analyzed the first proposal of this project and other standards about environmental testing. According to this new ISO proposal and current ISO standards and considering aspects of these related standards focused in biometric evaluations, a detailed methodology has been defined. This methodology consists of two parts: on the one hand, the definition of the environmental factors to analyse, including how to generate, control and measure them, and on the other hand, the specification about how to perform the biometric evaluation.