Infant-ID: Fingerprints for Global Good

TL;DR

This paper introduces Infant-Prints, a low-cost infant fingerprint recognition system, demonstrating its effectiveness in accurately identifying infants over time to improve healthcare and vaccination tracking in developing countries.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, affordable infant fingerprint system with a custom hardware device and high-resolution matcher, validated through a longitudinal study with 315 infants.

Findings

Achieved 95.2% TAR at 1.0% FAR for infants aged 8-16 weeks.

Demonstrated reliable recognition over a 12-month period.

Validated system in real-world hospital setting.

Abstract

In many of the least developed and developing countries, a multitude of infants continue to suffer and die from vaccine-preventable diseases and malnutrition. Lamentably, the lack of official identification documentation makes it exceedingly difficult to track which infants have been vaccinated and which infants have received nutritional supplements. Answering these questions could prevent this infant suffering and premature death around the world. To that end, we propose Infant-Prints, an end-to-end, low-cost, infant fingerprint recognition system. Infant-Prints is comprised of our (i) custom built, compact, low-cost (85 USD), high-resolution (1,900 ppi), ergonomic fingerprint reader, and (ii) high-resolution infant fingerprint matcher. To evaluate the efficacy of Infant-Prints, we collected a longitudinal infant fingerprint database captured in 4 different sessions over a 12-month time span (December 2018 to January 2020), from 315 infants at the Saran Ashram Hospital, a charitable hospital in Dayalbagh, Agra, India. Our experimental results demonstrate, for the first time, that Infant-Prints can deliver accurate and reliable recognition (over time) of infants enrolled between the ages of 2-3 months, in time for effective delivery of vaccinations, healthcare, and nutritional supplements (TAR=95.2% @ FAR = 1.0% for infants aged 8-16 weeks at enrollment and authenticated 3 months later).