During the enrollment process, a person's biometric information is captured off-card and then transferred on-card for storage and verification purpose. Since Java Card technology-based cards are generally limited in their resources, the entire data captured off-card is not sent to the card. What is sent is a digested version of the biometric data and is very specific to a particular algorithm. For this sample, however, a password is small enough that the entire password is transferred to the card.
The user-specific data transferred makes up a reference template that is used later for verification. At the end of the enrollment process, there also exists an associated public template. The public template consists of information for the off-card tool to capture the relevant information from the user during verification.
For example, in the Precise Biometrics implementation of the fingerprint biometric API, the public template contains the coordinates, relative to the reference point for capturing fingerprint information. The off-card tool looks at these coordinates and extracts that information from the user. The public template defines the data requirements for verification. For this sample, the public template does not contain any such specification since the entire password is compared. In the sample, the public template just contains version information.