Operational Tradeoffs in the 2018 Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate Biometric Technology Rally

The 2018 Biometric Technology Rally was an evaluation, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, that challenged industry to provide face or face/iris systems capable of unmanned, traveler identification in a high-throughput security environment. Eleven selected systems were installed at the Maryland Test Facility (MdTF), a DHS S&T affiliated biometrics testing laboratory, and evaluated using a sample of 363 naive human subjects recruited from the general public. The performance of each system was examined based on measured throughput (efficiency), matching capability (effectiveness), and user satisfaction. This research documents the operational tradeoffs between these three measures of system performance. Specifically, we perform two tradeoff analyses: efficiency versus effectiveness and satisfaction versus both efficiency and effectiveness. These tradeoff analyses allow us to determine how and if these three performance measures are related in the various kinds of biometric systems we tested. For example, are higher throughput systems also more effective? Do people prefer systems that are faster or more effective? Our results show there is no clear relationship between how quickly a system can process a user and how well it can identify the user. Furthermore, there was also no significant relationship observed between how quickly a system can process a user and how satisfied the user is with the system. However, there was a strong relationship between how well a system identifies a user and how satisfied the user is with the system. These outcomes suggest that some systems could benefit by leveraging additional collection time to collect a higher quality image. Users did not tend to prefer faster systems but did prefer a system they thought was working as intended. Finally, these results also show that in regards to public acceptance, systems designers should focus on correctly identifying larger populations of users rather than how quickly a given user can be processed.