1. A biometric index and search apparatus that searches, based on a matching operation, for a probe in a biometric corpus stored in a database, comprising: a plurality of prototypes; an index processor coupled to the database, based on the prototypes, the index processor indexing the biometric corpus into an indexed-corpus; and a search processor coupled to the index processor and the database, the search processor selects templates in the indexed-corpus as a search corpus based on the probe and the prototypes, and searches the search corpus using the matching operation to generate an identity candidate.