INESC TEC was the only institute in Europe to obtain the MINEX III certification

INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM), in partnership with the Portuguese Mint and Official Printing Office, obtained the MINEX III certification – Minitiae Interoperability Exchange – by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The MINEX III online testing programme aims to assess the quality and robustness of biometric recognition algorithms, and if they meet the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) criteria.

INESC TEC submitted its minutiae biometric algorithm and was the only research institute in Europe to obtain this certification. The results are available here.

In order to achieve quality specifications and obtain the PIV, the software must comply with criteria related to two different stages: extracting templates from fingerprint images (enroll) and pairing between templates (matching).

The tests carried out by the test platform are published on the official NIST page, in order to verify if the biometric algorithms meet the necessary criteria for obtaining the PIV, and to compare them to the competitors. By confirming the existence of these criteria, the efficiency and effectiveness of the biometric algorithms are ensured from an operational point of view.