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              SD-27A:  Special Database 27 - Master Collection
              -------------------------------------------------
                            09/20/2010 Release


The National Institute of Standards and Technology in conjunction with the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained a database of grayscale 
fingerprint images, corresponding minutiae and selected latent fingerprints 
corresponding to fingerprint images in the data set.   This data set is 
formally known as Special Database 27 (SD-27).    In 2010 this data set was 
expanded to provide 1000ppi imagery to the research community and has been 
made available for electronic distribution.   This data set is herein 
referred to as SD-27A.

The structure of this distribution archive is as follows:
	\500ppi-Legacy
		Contains the original SD-27 CD distribution.

	\1000ppi
		Contains the full set of SD-27 exemplar and latent 
                images in 1000ppi JPEG-2000 lossless format.

Filename format for the \1000ppi\Exemplars-JPEG2000-Lossless directory:

	NNN-ZZ[-XXXX].jp2 

	Where:

	NNN = Corresponds to subject number
	ZZ = Finger number
	-XXXX = Maps this image to its corresponding latent image filename 
		found in the Latents-JPEG2000-Lossless directory, as XXXX.jp2


For further information on SD-27 please refer to the documentation 
found in the \500ppi-Legacy\DOC directory.   For other questions regarding 
this dataset please contact NBIS@nist.gov

Also, please note the following points on the new images:

-All new images in SD-27A have been compressed using the JPEG-2000 
lossless format. A free reference implementation of JPEG-2000 is 
included in the latest NBIS software  distribution.  For more information 
on NBIS please refer to http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/nbis.cfm

-All new images in SD-27A have been rescanned from the SD-27 card set when
possible.  While the biometric data presented will be from for the individual
in this data set, some of the cards may have been updated/replaced since the 
original SD-27 and therefore the biometric images may not be the same exact 
biometric sample image from SD-27.

-Not all biometric records could be located for the SD-27A rescan process
therefore SD-27A contains a subset of the individuals who's biometrics
were presented in SD-27.

Shahram Orandi (sorandi@nist.gov), John Libert (jlibert@nist.gov), 
Kenneth Ko (kenko@nist.gov)
Image Group - Information Access Division-ITL NIST