Prediction and validation of indexing performance for biometrics

The performance of a recognition system is usually experimentally determined. Therefore, one cannot predict the performance of a recognition system a priori for a new dataset. In this paper, a statistical model to predict the value of k in the rank-k identification rate for a given biometric system is presented. Thus, one needs to search only the topmost k match scores to locate the true match object. A geometrical probability distribution is used to model the number of non match scores present in the set of similarity scores. The model is tested in simulation and by using a public dataset. The model is also indirectly validated against the previously published results. The actual results obtained using publicly available database are very close to the predicted results which validates the proposed model.