This document establishes a systematic description of the concepts in the field of biometrics pertaining to recognition of human beings. This document also reconciles variant terms in use in pre-existing International Standards on biometrics against the preferred terms, thereby clarifying the use of terms in this field.

This document does not cover concepts (represented by terms) from information technology, pattern recognition, biology, mathematics, etc. Biometrics uses such fields of knowledge as a basis.

In principle, mode-specific terms are outside of scope of this document.