ANSI 378

ANSI 378, alternatively ANSI/INCITS 378 is a format that stores a description of the minutae (differentiating features) of fingerprints, for production from a fingerprint scan and use by a fingerprint matcher. It is produced by the American National Standards Institute, and the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards, giving its name. There are three major versions:
 * ANSI 378-2004; "[w]hen people mention ANSI 378 without specifying version, they usually refer to this original 2004 version."
 * ANSI 378-2009, similar but incompatible
 * ANSI 378-2009/AM1, a slight variation ("AM" is short for "amendment" )

Identification
ANSI 378 files will begin with, which is ASCII "FMR" followed by a zero byte. Following this is the version identifier, which is (" 20" followed by a zero byte) for the 2004 version,  ("030" then zero byte) for the 2009 version , and  ("035", zero byte) for the 2009/AM1 version. The magic number and format of the 2004 version are the same as for the related but incompatible ISO 19794-2; gives an algorithm to tell them apart.

Specification

 * The official specifications (all 60 dollars):
 * 378-2004
 * 378-2009
 * 378-2009/AM1
 * Robert Važan's unofficial specifications

Software

 * FingerprintIO (Java library)
 * BiomDI

Sample Files

 * NIST samples, from (in a tar/gzip archive)

Links

 * INCITS page
 * Overview ofANSI INCITS Fingerprint Standards on Data Interchange Format