53: Strategies for Visualizing the Biometric Capacity of Automated Identification Systems

Music City Center 

The biometric capacity of a system refers to the number of biometric profiles that can be enrolled in the system while maintaining a given level of identification accuracy. In this work, we will discuss indirect ways of estimating the biometric capacity in terms of the random match probability between biometric profiles when the profiles are only observed in a noisy environment. Specifically, if the between-profile comparison distribution is indistinguishable from the within-profile comparison distribution, then the two profiles are considered to be indistinguishable and should be "associated" in the corresponding network. However, when only using samples from biometric profiles instead of the actual profiles themselves, we can only arrive at a probabilistic assessment of whether or not this type of association actually exists. We will explore various strategies for presenting network graphs for pairwise associations when the association can only be estimated, and demonstrate how the resulting network graphs can be used to characterize the biometric capacity of a system. We will use a handwriting biometric system to illustrate the proposed methodologies.

Biometric Capacity

Network Graph

Minimum Cramér-von Mises

Pattern Recognition

Forensic Statistics 

Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security