Release notes for MegaMatcher 10.0 line products

These release notes are relevant for the following products:

• MegaMatcher 10.0 Standard / Extended SDK
• VeriFinger 10.0 Standard / Extended SDK
• VeriLook 10.0 Standard / Extended SDK
• VeriEye 10.0 Standard / Extended SDK
• VeriSpeak 10.0 Standard / Extended SDK

List of releases:

• June 21, 2016 (Revision 167245)

See also the list of release notes for previous versions.

June 21, 2017

Product revision: 167245

The first release of MegaMatcher 10.0 SDK line.

• Fingerprints
  • Improved algorithms
    • Fingerprint extraction, matching, and generalization algorithms have been improved.
    • New fingerprint quality estimation is included.
    Note: new matching algorithm for small templates may use up to 3 times more memory to provide best recognition quality. If this is a concern, same memory usage as in previous line may be restored by setting NBiometricEngine.FingersMatchingSpeed parameter to High.
  • Minimal minutia count
    Fingerprint extractor reports an error status if fingerprint does not meet minimal quality requirements. In that case application should attempt to rescan the fingerprint. However, in some cases there is no possibility to rescan and it is preferable to decrease default requirements to extract lower quality template rather than have no template at all. NBiometricEngine now exposes a FingersMinimalMinutiaCount property for that purposes. Also, FingersQualityThreshold property is often used together.
• Faces
  • Face detection has been enhanced to detect even more faces and support higher degrees of rotation. The new algorithms are automatically enabled by increasing MaximalRotation parameters in NBiometricEngine. Also there is a "Faces.DetectMore" which detects even more faces the default detector cannot find.
  • Profile faces images are now fully supported: profile faces can be detected, extracted, and matched. Please note that it is not possible to match profile faces with frontal.
  • Previously face detection confidence was stored in NBiometricAttributes.Quality property. After template extraction the same Quality property was updated with extraction quality value. To avoid this confusion, a new NBiometricAttributes.DetectionConfidence property was introduced specifically for detection confidence. Quality property now only contains template extraction quality. This is a backwards incompatible change which may require changes in user application (if application uses the properties directly). NFaceView components supplied with the SDK will handle the new properties automatically.
  • New age detection algorithm is included.
  • ICAO:
    • New checks:
      • Face Darkness
      • Pixelation
      • Looking Away
      • Skin Reflection
      • Glasses Reflections
      • Red Eye
      • Skin Tone
      • Washed Out Colors
    • "ICAO" fixes: Red-eye correction.
  • Liveness check: Custom liveness check steps support. Ported liveness actions from FaceVerification custom project.
• Irises
  • Irises extractor was enhanced to better handle complex extraction cases. This can greatly improve recognition accuracy for databases which contain many badly scanned images.
  • A new irises detection confidence value is available which can be helpful to determine if images should to be rescanned.
• .NET
  • .NET libraries updated to use .NET framework 4.5 (from 2.0).
  • Async versions for most of methods in NBiometricEngine and NBiometricClient are now available in addition to synchronous ones. Legacy Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) is still supported for backwards compatibility.
  • Previously Neurotec.Media_FX35 and _FX45 libraries were distributed to allow NImage conversion to WPF images. Now this functionality is integrated into Neurotec.Media.dll and these extensions are no longer provided separately.
  • System.Drawing.Point and System.Drawing.Rectangle have been replaced with the same named classes in Neurotec.Drawing namespace. This should help to remove unneeded dependencies for Windows or ASP.NET services.
  • .NET Portable libraries have been replaced with .NET Standard 1.1. They can be useful if writing portable software which needs to support multiple platforms. Support for platform-specific features, such as image conversion to WinForms or WPF bitmaps is excluded. The libraries can be found in Bin/dotNET_Standard directory.
• Upgraded supported programming and development environments
  • Dropped armeabi (ARM v5) architecture support in Android. Minimal supported Android version raised accordingly to 19. Currently supported architectures include armeabi-v7a, arm64-v8a, x86.
  • Dropped support for Visual Studio 2008. Currently supported versions include VS 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2017.
  • Windows XP is no longer supported. If your application requires Windows XP support, please use NeurotecSDK product line 9.0.
• Android
  • New multimodal sample is included which demonstrates how to use multiple biometric modalities (fingerprints, faces, irises, etc.) in a single app.
  • NCore.setContext() no longer requires Activity or Service context. ApplicationContext can be used instead. However, some fingerprint scanners will not work in such case.
• Standards
  • Implemented new ANSI/NIST-ITL 1 (Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial & Other Biometric Information) standards:
    • New standard versions - ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011, ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011 Update:2013 Edition 2 and ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011 Update:2015.
    • Implemented "Incits 378" vendor block, defined by INCITS Technical Committee M1 developed standard INCITS 378, for Minutiae data (Type-9) record.
    • Added Type-20 (Source representaton) and Type-21 (Associated context) records.
    • Deprecated Type-3, Type-5 and Type-6 records.
  • Simplified ANTemplate/Type-X records API by adding empty constructors.