Influence of Test Protocols on Biometric Recognition Performance Estimation

The performance of a biometric system is commonly evaluated by the obtained recognition rates and comparing the results against the ones reported in the literature on the same database. An aspect that has not received the deserved attention in the literature concerns the influence, on the achieved rates, of the test protocol employed to select the enrol and probe data. We provide a detailed analysis of the impact of the experimental choices on the estimated performance, considering the recom-mendations provided by ISO/IEC 19795 standard. We use the UTFVP finger vein database, reproducing results presented in the literature using multiple protocols. Our experiments highlight the possibility of obtaining equal error rates reduced by half simply by changing the test protocol.