NOTICE

This software (or technical data) was produced for the U. S. Government under contract, and is subject to the Rights in Data-General Clause 52.227-14, Alt. IV (DEC 2007)

(C) 2019 The MITRE Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited. Public Release Case Number 18-0812.

Overview

The Biometric Image Quality Toolkit (BIQT) is an extensible framework for evaluating the quality of biometric images. It exposes a vendor-agnostic interface through which new modalities and algorithms can be integrated into the framework, and it also exposes a high-level Quality API which can be used to integrate the framework into larger systems.

Quick Start

Use the mitre/biqt image hosted on Docker Hub to access a preconfigured CentOS 7 environment with the BIQT command-line interface. This image includes the BIQTIris and BIQTFace providers.

The following Linux-based example shows how to start a mitre/biqt container capable of accessing and using the biometric images stored in the directory /path/to/biometric/images on the host filesystem.

user@localhost:~/$ docker run --rm -v /path/to/images:/data -it mitre/biqt
[root@66d3679381d0 /]# biqt -m iris iris-image-001.png 

Installation

The framework targets Windows 10 and CentOS Linux 7.4.

Build and install instructions for Docker, CentOS Linux 7.4, and Windows 10 can be found in INSTALL.md.

Integrating Providers

The BIQT Framework can easily be extended to integrate additional quality libraries. In general, providers must conform to the following requirements:

• Providers must include a descriptor.json file so that metadata about the provider can be communicated to users.
• Providers must be installed to $BIQT_HOME/providers (Linux) or %BIQT_HOME%/providers (Windows).
• The name of the provider directory, the provider library name, and the name given in a the provider's descriptor must match.

Setting Up a New Provider

The setup_provider.py python script generates a directory structure with template files which serve as the basis for a new provider. The following example demonstrates how to generate a new provider named MyNewProvider.

CentOS Linux 7.4

python $BIQT_HOME/scripts/setup_provider.py MyNewProvider

Windows 10

python %BIQT_HOME%/scripts/setup_provider.py MyNewProvider

In the above example, the script creates a directory named MyNewProvider in the current directory and populates it with a minimal descriptor, header file, code file, and CMakeLists.txt. TODO elements in each of these files indicate areas which must be addressed.

Once implemented, providers can be built and installed into the framework using the following commands. Note that the BIQT framework must already be installed and the BIQT_HOME environment variable must be set.

Ubuntu Linux 22.04

cd ~/MyProvider
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
make install

Related Resources

Reference image quality libraries for face and iris images are available on GitHub.

• BIQTFace
• BIQTIris
• BIQTContactDetector