Origins
The BioAPI specification is one of a set of International Standards produced jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) under their Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1), Subcommittee 37 on Biometrics. The Standard was based on some early work done in the United States of America and by thWhat and why?
The purpose of the BioAPI specification is to define an architecture and all necessary interfaces (using C programming language specifications) to allow biometric applications (perhaps distributed across a network) to be integrated from modules provided by different vendors. The ability for system integrator to produce complete systems using components from multiple vendors is essential in the rapidly changing technology of biometrics. It gives flexibility in the provision of modules, avoidsThe basic architecture
The basic architecture of BioAPI 2.0 is illustrated in the figure at the top of this page. There are multiple possible (independent) ''biometric applications'' that interact with a ''BioAPI Framework'', which in turn routes their messages to ''Biometric Service Providers (BSPs)'' that support the various biometric capture devices, image enhancement modules, feature extraction, matching, searching, etc. A later extension of the architecture introduces the concept of a ''Biometric Function Provider (BFP)'' and defines further lower-level interfaces between a BFP and a controlling BSP. This minimizes the amount of software that a biometric device vendor needs to develop, allowing (other) software vendors to do most of the work of producing the BSP with an interface to the framework.Procurement issues
The ''BioAPI Framework'' is the heart of BioAPI. Procurement of biometric systems need to consider the merits of basing their invitations-to-tender on systems conforming to the BioAPI Standard, which contain a BioAPI Framework module. The importance of this Framework module is recognized by thDistributed systems
It might be uncommon to find multiple biometric applications and multiple biometric devices on a single computer system, but the long-term aim of telebiometrics is to allow multiple biometrics applications on multiple systems on the Internet to interwork with multiple other systems that support biometrics devices. BioAPI has already laid the foundations for this, with its architecture. Another ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 37 Standard – BioAPI Interworking Protocol (BIP) – specifies an enhancement of the BioAPI Framework that essentially maps all API calls into network messages (defined usingReferences
* ISO/IEC 19784-1, ''Information Technology – BioAPI – Biometric Application Programming Interface – Part 1: BioAPI Specification'' * ISO/IEC 24708, ''Information Technology — BioAPI Interworking Protocol (BIP)'' Biometrics software