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A Longitudinal Study on Fingerprint Recognition in Infants, Toddlers, and Children
Insights
Infants as young as five days can be enrolled using fingerprint biometrics. Reliable recognition is achieved for infants after two months and for older children within a year, aiding identification and health monitoring.
Area of Science:
- Biometrics and Human-Computer Interaction
- Pediatric Health and Development
- Public Health and Developing Nations
Background:
- Millions of children in developing countries suffer preventable deaths due to poor health monitoring and lack of identification.
- Fingerprint recognition offers a potential solution, but data on young children is scarce, limiting understanding of optimal usage ages and enrollment frequency.
- Existing studies on pediatric fingerprint biometrics use small, short-term datasets, necessitating further validation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the effectiveness of a high-resolution contactless fingerprint scanner for children aged 0-15 years.
- To determine the earliest age for reliable fingerprint enrollment and recognition in infants.
- To assess the required enrollment frequency for accurate long-term recognition in a diverse pediatric population.
Main Methods:
- Collected a controlled, diverse, longitudinal dataset of fingerprints from children aged 0-15 years using a high-resolution contactless scanner.
- Assessed recognition performance based on age at enrollment and time elapsed since enrollment.
- Analyzed True Accept Rate (TAR) at a specific False Accept Rate (FAR) of 0.1%.
Main Results:
- Infants can be successfully enrolled at five days old.
- Reliable recognition (TAR=100% @ FAR=0.1%) is achievable for infants after two months.
- Children aged 4-15 years can be reliably recognized (TAR=98.72% @ FAR=0.1%) after one year.
Conclusions:
- High-resolution contactless fingerprint scanning is effective for identifying children from infancy.
- The study establishes feasible enrollment ages and recognition intervals for pediatric biometric systems.
- This technology can significantly improve health monitoring and identification systems for vulnerable children.
Abstract:
Millions of children in developing countries face preventable deaths due to inadequate vaccination and malnutrition, in part due to insufficient monitoring and the absence of official identification. A reliable fingerprint recognition system can be a practical solution to address this issue. However, the scarcity of longitudinal fingerprint datasets for young children leads to unresolved questions regarding the earliest age for fingerprint biometric use, the frequency of enrollment required for reliable recognition, and the methods to accommodate age-related changes. A few recent studies introduced high-resolution fingerprint scanners and showed promising recognition performance for young children. However, these studies were conducted on a small dataset over a shorter period with limited diversity; further evaluation of their finding is essential. This study assessed the effectiveness of a high-resolution contactless scanner in a controlled, diverse longitudinal dataset of children (0-15 years). Our results indicate that infants can be enrolled at five days old and reliably recognized after two months with a TAR= 100% @ FAR = 0.1%, and children aged 4-15 years can be recognized after one year with a TAR= 98.72% @ FAR = 0.1%.
