Recognizing infants and toddlers over an on-production fingerprint database

Abstract

It is widely known that biometric systems based on adults fingerprints have reached an outstanding performance when compared against other biometric traits. This explains their extensive use by governmental agencies in charge of citizen identification. Nevertheless, the performance is highly degraded when fingerprints of newborns or toddlers are used. In this work, we analyze the performance of existing solutions (both at sensor and matching level) using 45000 infants fingerprints taken from an on-production civilian database. We also propose a solution by zooming the input fingerprints with an interpolation factor based on ridges distances. The developed solution shows improvements in both fingerprint quality (NFIQ 2.0) as well as recognition performance.