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Final results of BioTesting Europe
"The Way Forward: Towards European Testing and Certification of Biometric Components and Systems"

The BioTesting Europe project, funded by the European Commission under PASR2006, aims to set out the prerequisites for the establishment of testing and certification capabilities on biometric components and systems in Europe. This is driven by the fact that large scale national and international biometrics based identity systems (passports, visa, eID cards) are being developed and procured, mainly by governments and the European Commission (EU VIS / BMS). Also the increasing use of biometrics in access control and surveillance applications drives the increasing need for developing more trust and predictability of biometrics based applications.

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INTRODUCTION

According to EC policies and as stated in the The Hague Programme, a coherent approach and harmonised solutions on biometric identifiers and data are necessary in the fight against illegal immigration and to improve security for EU citizens.

Now that large scale passport and visa projects are in the procurement and/or implementation stage, it is now more than ever necessary that biometric products and systems are tested and certified to uniform standards and criteria.

It is recognised that although much work has been done in the area of independent testing of biometric systems, there are still many other issues to be resolved due to a fragmentation of efforts and a lack of input by end users. The results of various tests in the last few years has shown that test results are still not comparable and that interoperability of biometric technology has not yet been achieved. To improve this situation, this project aims to establish European capabilities for performance and interoperability testing and security evaluation of biometric systems.

Finally, BioTesting Europe will provide the capabilities for independent testing of interoperability, performance (accuracy, speed), conformance, durability (environmental influences) and human interfaces. The scope is five fold: system level, sub-system level, device level, processes and people (training & education).