Electronic Biometric Transmission Specifications (EBTS)

In accordance with the recommendations of the FBI/CJIS Advisory Policy Board (APB) Identification Services Subcommittee, the FBI has developed this standard for electronically encoding and transmitting biometric image, identification, and arrest data that extends the American National Standards Institute/National Institute of Standards and Technology – Information Technology Laboratory (ANSI/NIST-ITL) standard. ANSI/NIST-ITL is developed and maintained in conjunction with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the biometric identification community.

While the aforementioned ANSI/NIST-ITL standard provides the guidelines for the exchange of biometric information between various federal, state, local, tribal, and international systems, the FBI’s EBTS (Electronic Biometric Transmission Specifications) defines requirements to which agencies must adhere when electronically communicating with the FBI. Functional changes to the EBTS are documented in Technical and Operational Updates (TOUs) as an interim solution between major versions. User compliance requires adherence to the most recent major version of the EBTS and incorporation of all TOUs.

The FBI’s EBTS and its future revisions will inherit the basic requirements for logical records set forth in the ANSI/NIST-ITL standard. However, the FBI/CJIS-specific requirements for the contents and composition of logical records Type-1 (Header Information), Type-2 (Transaction Descriptive, Demographic and Biographic Information), Type-4 (Fingerprint Image Descriptive Information), Type-7 (Tenprint Fingerprint Card Images), Type-9 (Fingerprint Minutiae Information), Type-10 (Photo Images), Type-13 (Latent Friction Ridge Images), Type-14 (Variable Resolution Fingerprint Images), Type-15 (Palm Print Images), Type-17 (Iris Images), and other record types are contained in this EBTS.

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