Biometric recognition of newborns: Identification using palmprints

We present some results on newborn identification through high-resolution images of palmar surfaces. To our knowledge, there is no biometric system currently available that can be effectively used for newborn identification. The manual procedure of capturing inked footprints in practice for this purpose is limited for use inside hospitals and is not an effective solution for identification purposes. The use of friction ridge patterns on the hands of newborns is challenging due to both the small size of newborn's papillary ridges, which are, on average, 2.5 to 3 times smaller than the ridges in adult fingerprints, and their fragility, making them amenable to deformation. The proposed palmprint based automatic system for newborn identification is relatively easy to use and shows the feasibility of this approach. Experiments were performed on images collected from 250 newborns at the University Hospital (Universidade Federal do Paraná). An image acquisition protocol was developed in order to collect suitable images. When considering the good quality palmar images, the results show that the proposed approach is promising.