Steps to solving the infant biometric problem with ridge‐based biometrics

Abstract

The pressing infant biometric problem is to find a biometric means to identify infants cheaply, reliably, and automatically. Physical traits of infants are tiny, delicate, and grow rapidly. The authors focus on a novel area of friction-ridge skin as a potential answer: the ball under the big toe. The ballprint is readily accessible, with more features and larger ridges than a fingerprint. The authors followed 54 newborns for 2 years, capturing their ballprints with an adult fingerprint scanner within 3 days of birth, at 2 months, at 6 months, and at 2 years. The authors show the growth of the ballprint is isotropic rather than affine during infancy. The isotropic growth rate from birth can be measured by the change in inter-ridge spacing, which the authors show precisely mirrors change in physical length from birth, as recorded by World Health Organisation for large, diverse infant populations. From 2 months of age, by using isotropic scaling to compensate for growth, the authors successfully matched good quality images with 0% equal error rate using existing adult fingerprint technology, even for captures 22 months apart. These findings flag the value of ballprints as a practical means of infant identification, by themselves, or together or sequentially with other biometrics.

A Survey on Authentication for ATM Transaction System

“…This classifier employs various support vector machines and k-nearest neighbor algorithms. [2] Widespread use of fingerprint scanner can be seen in tablets and smartphones coupled with security and ease of use provided by the means of biometric authentication. It is difficult to obtain the performance metrics due to the form factor of the embedded sensors in these devices.…”

Infant-ID: Fingerprints for Global Good

“…Furthermore, parents may have concerns about the safety of capturing an infant's iris image. Footprint recognition [26], [27], requires removing socks and shoes and cleaning the infant's feet, and palmprint recognition [28] requires opening an infant's entire hand where the concavity of the palm makes it difficult to image.…”

Improved CycleGAN-based feature recognition in young children and preschool education research

“…Kotzerke, J. et al proposed that adult biometrics, such as face, fingerprint, etc., are not fully applicable to feature recognition in the early stages of toddlers. The need of the hour is to identify the biometric features of children aged 0-4 years through reliable and stable biometrics to combat child trafficking as well as to improve the child vaccination rates in the country [14]. Kathiresan, T. et al used cepstrum coefficients to investigate the recognizability of infant-oriented speech styles.…”