With a number of emerging applications requiring biometric recognition of children (e.g., tracking child vaccination schedules, identifying missing children and preventing newborn baby swaps in hospitals), investigating image capture of biometric traits of children and temporal stability of biometric recognition accuracy for children is important. Image capture and persistence of recognition accuracy of three of the most commonly used biometric traits (fingerprints, face and iris) has been investigated for adults. However, they have not been studied systematically for children in the age group of 0-4 years. Given that very young children are often uncooperative and do not comprehend or follow instructions, in our opinion, among all biometric modalities, fingerprints are the most viable for recognizing children. This is primarily because it is easier to capture fingerprints of young children compared to other biometric traits, e.g., iris, where a child needs to stare directly towards the camera to initiate iris capture. In this research, our goal is to investigate image capture and persistence of fingerprint recognition for children in the age group of 0-4 years. Based on preliminary results obtained for the data collected in the first phase of our study (see Figs. 1 and 2), use of fingerprints for recognition of 0-4 year-old children appears promising.
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| Fig. 1. Data collection effort in India. (a) Parents waiting outside the
data collection room to provide their child’s biometric data, (b) parents signing the consent form
agreeing to provide their child’s biometric data, and (c) data capture at the two capture stations. |
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| Fig. 2. Sample face and fingerprint images of infants and toddlers captured in India. |
Relevant Publication(s)
1. A. K. Jain, S. S. Arora, L. Best-Rowden, K. Cao, P. S. Sudhish and A. Bhatnagar, "Biometrics for Child Vaccination and Welfare: Persistence of Fingerprint Recognition for Infants and Toddlers", MSU Technical Report, MSU-CSE-15-7, April 15, 2015. [pdf]
2. A. K. Jain, K. Cao and S. S. Arora, "Recognizing Infants and Toddlers using Fingerprints: Increasing the Vaccination Coverage", IJCB, Clearwater, Florida, USA, Sept. 29-Oct. 2, 2014. [pdf]
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