Regardless of the concerns of Europeans and others about U.S. de facto governance of biometric standards, countries around the world still base their data interchange formats on a document written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and approved by the American National Standards Institute.
This document has been revised many times over the years. I first worked with the 1993 version of the document, which concentrated on binary and grayscale fingerprints with resolutions as high as 500 pixels per inch, but sometimes lower.
The new 2025 version (PDF), released in March 2026, covers a lot more. And sometimes a lot less.
- 1 Transaction information
- 2 User-defined descriptive text
- 3 Deprecated
- 4 Legacy
- 5 Deprecated
- 6 Deprecated
- 7 User-defined image
- 8 Signature image
- 9 Friction ridge metadata
- 10 Photographic body part imagery (including face and SMT)
- 11 Voice data
- 12 Forensic dental and oral data
- 13 Variable-resolution latent friction ridge image
- 14 Variable-resolution fingerprint image
- 15 Variable-resolution palm print image
- 16 User-defined variable-resolution testing image
- 17 Iris image
- 18 DNA data
- 19 Variable-resolution plantar image
- 20 Source representation
- 21 Associated context
- 22 Non-photographic imagery
- 23-97 Reserved for future use
- 98 Information assurance
- 99 CBEFF biometric data record
Note the “deprecated” and “legacy” data types. In 1993, Type 4 was the gold standard for fingerprint images; now it’s just “legacy.” And forget about binary representations or anything less than 500 ppi.
Time marches on.
But some people have been around for much of the ride. I scanned the lists of working group members and found Kenneth Blue, Tom Buss, Roland Fournier, Patrick Grother, Mike McCabe, John Splain, Mark Walch, and many others who remember Type 4 and 250 ppi binary images.
And the canvassees included government and industry representatives from within and outside of the United States, including Canada, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Slovakia, Switzerland, other countries I probably mnissed, and INTERPOL.
If Europe or other countries do break away from NIST standards, it will be a rupturing break.
Bredemarket 
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