Ubuntu Validation Available, Required in February

[Fiumara, Gregory P. (Fed)]

Hi fingerprint evaluation stakeholders,

Keep in mind that the evaluation systems for fingerprint evaluations other than MINEX will switch to Ubuntu 20.04.03 LTS on 14 February 2022. Updated validation packages are available on GitHub under the ubuntu branch for all evaluations. The updated scripts also include additional checks for many common issues we’ve seen across the evaluations.

• ELFT: https://github.com/usnistgov/elft/tree/ubuntu/elft_1_x/validation
• SlapSeg III: https://github.com/usnistgov/slapseg/tree/ubuntu/slapsegiii/validation
• PFT III: https://github.com/usnistgov/pft/tree/ubuntu/pftiii/validation

We encourage you to develop against these packages now and inform us of any issues you may encounter before 14 February, at which point, they will be merged into master and required for participation.

To go along with the operating system updates, all evaluation code now builds with CMake and requires the C++17 standard. We made slight API changes in SlapSeg and PFT (ELFT already used C++17) to go along with use of the new standard.

PFT III

• The getImplementation() method’s configurationDirectory parameter is now a std::filesystem::path& instead of a std::string&.
• Data is passed in std::vector<std::byte> instead of std::vector<uint8_t>.

SlapSeg III

• Implementations may now use a separate directory with configuration and model files. Like PFT and ELFT, SlapSeg now exposes the path to this directory via getImplementation().
• Data is passed in std::vector<std::byte> instead of std::vector<uint8_t>.

ELFT

• Validation now requires environment variables ELFT_REUSE_PROBE_TEMPLATES, ELFT_REUSE_REFERENCE_TEMPLATES, and ELFT_REUSE_ENROLLMENT_DATABASES to be set to YES or NO to let NIST know if previous data may be reused.

Thanks for your continued patience during our datacenter transition.

-Greg (@nist.gov)