Extracting minutiae programmatically

[mistial-dev]

Hello,

Is there a proper way to programmatically extract the minutiae? I'm interested in releasing some software to build a PIV biometric template (CBEFF).

I can think of a couple of hacks that would work (deserializing to a class that's basically a copy but not protected, abusing reflection, etc) but I'd prefer not to break upstream compatibility with future versions if I don't need to.

Is there a more "official" way to get access to the minutiae?

[robertvazan]

Minutiae are kept private for good reasons. Minutia structure and interpretation could change with any version to improve algorithm performance. There are however two documented ways to get minutiae out:

1. Deserialize the documented native template format into a data structure. This gets you maximum information, but it can change between versions.
2. Use FingerprintIO (currently available only in Java unfortunately) to parse ANSI or ISO template exported from SourceAFIS (again possible only in Java at the moment). These templates have format frozen in time and FingerprintIO will parse them into a documented data structure.

I was also considering opening up a mutable template API, but porting FingerprintIO to NET has higher priority.

[mistial-dev]

Ah. I see. That makes sense.