NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ODNI News Release No. 16-18

March 26, 2018

IARPA Announces the Winners of the Nail to Nail Fingerprint Challenge

WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announces the winners of the Nail to Nail Fingerprint—“N2N”—Challenge, a competition to develop and enhance automated methods to capture accurate nail to nail fingerprints comparable or better than the existing standards for accuracy, speed, and invisible, “latent,” capture accuracy. The N2N challenge launched in February 2017 and sought challengers from around the world to develop automated N2N capture technology capable of biometric recognition that is as good as, or better than, existing standard human operator assisted methods.



Performance of these solutions was evaluated using data collected from a live test with human subjects, resulting in the collection of over 48,000 live and latent fingerprints. The winning teams were then invited to present their solutions during a workshop in Washington, D.C., between March 20 - 21, 2018. The winners comprised of teams from across global industry and, along with the finalists, agreed to share the collected fingerprints from the live test with IARPA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology for research purposes. This fingerprint data is the only public dataset of its kind. “IARPA hopes that by making the dataset open source and available to the public, it will contribute significantly to the research conducted in the biometrics community,” says Christopher Boehnen, IARPA program manager.



“I am very pleased with the results of the N2N Challenge. The benefit of holding a crowdsourcing challenge is that we were able to invite a large number of participants, enabling us to explore a diverse range of potential solutions. The challenge sought to tackle a very difficult technical problem, and challengers’ solutions have played a significant role in advancing scientific research in the biometrics field,” Boehnen says.



To learn more about the challenge and for the complete list of winners and finalists please visit the challenge microsite at: https://www.iarpa.gov/challenges/n2n/n2n.html.



IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the Intelligence Community. Additional information on IARPA and its research may be found on www.iarpa.gov.



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