The law enforcement community at the state and local levels need to exchange fingerprint information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation using wavelet scalar quantized images. Vendors wish to develop, market, and sell commercial systems to these law enforcement entities and the FBI for encoding and decoding according to this specification developed by the FBI. Their implementations must first be tested against a reference encoder and reference decoder. These reference encoder and decoder implementations were developed at NIST, and a WSQ Compliance Test program was initiated for vendors seeking FBI Certification of their systems.
A standard set of fingerprint images is maintained on an FTP site at NIST. The vendors acquire these images, compress them at compression ratios of 5:1 and 15:1 and submit the results to NIST for compliance testing. The FBI then grants or denies WSQ Certification based on the test results from NIST.
This program has been debugged and developed while vendors benefited from the expertise acquired during the reference encoder and decoder development. This program is considered to be in maintenance mode with no further development necessary and so is being transferred to another division for ongoing maintenance and support.