Giving Infants an Identity
Anil Kumar Jain, Sunpreet S. Arora, Lacey Best-Rowden, Kai Cao, Prem Sewak Sudhish, Anjoo Bhatnagar, Yoshinori Koda · 2016
There is a growing demand for biometrics-based recognition of children for a number of applications, particularly in developing countries where children do not have any form of identification. These applications include tracking child vaccination schedules, identifying missing children, preventing fraud in food subsidies, and preventing newborn baby swaps in hospitals. Our objective is to develop a fingerprint-based identification system for infants (age range: 0-12 months)1. Our ongoing research has addressed the following issues: (i) design of a compact, comfortable, high-resolution (>1,000 ppi) fingerprint reader; (ii) image enhancement algorithms to improve quality of infant fingerprint images; and (iii) collection of longitudinal infant fingerprint data to evaluate identification accuracy over time. This collaboration between Michigan State University, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Saran Ashram Hospital, Agra, India and NEC Corporation, has demonstrated the feasibility of recognizing infants older than 4 weeks using fingerprints.