ISO/IEC TR 29198:2013 provides guidance on estimating how "challenging" or "stressing" is an evaluation dataset for fingerprint recognition, based on relative sample quality, relative rotation, deformation, and overlap between impressions. In addition, it establishes a method for construction of datasets of different levels of difficulty. It defines the relative level of difficulty of a fingerprint dataset used in technology evaluation of fingerprint recognition algorithms. Level of difficulty is based on differences between reference and probe samples in the aforementioned factors. ISO/IEC TR 29198:2013 addresses such issues as:

• characterizing level of difficulty attributable to differences between samples acquired from the same finger,
• developing statistical methodologies for representing the level of difficulty of a fingerprint dataset by aggregating influencing factors,
• comparing the level of difficulty of different fingerprint datasets,
• defining procedures for testing and reporting the level of difficulty of fingerprint datasets collected for technology evaluation,
• analysing mated pair data characteristics based on comparison scores,
• describing the archived data selection methodology for building a dataset for evaluation.

It provides guidelines for comparing the relative level of difficulty of fingerprint datasets.

Outside the scope of ISO/IEC TR 29198:2013 are:

• defining the quality of individual fingerprint images,
• defining the methodologies or explicit measures for evaluating or predicting the performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms.