Fingerprint Recognition of Young Children

In 1899, Galton first captured ink-on-paper fingerprints of a single child from birth until the age of 4.5 years, manually compared the prints, and concluded that “the print of a child at the age of 2.5 years would serve to identify him ever after.” Since then, ink-on-paper fingerprinting and manual comparison methods have been superseded by digital capture and automatic fingerprint comparison techniques, but only a few feasibility studies on child fingerprint recognition have been conducted. Here, we present the first systematic and rigorous longitudinal study that addresses the following questions: 1) Do fingerprints of young children possess the salient features required to uniquely recognize a child? 2) If so, at what age can a child’s fingerprints be captured with sufficient fidelity for recognition? 3) Can a child’s fingerprints be used to reliably recognize the child as he ages? For this paper, we collected fingerprints of 309 children (0–5 years old) four different times over a one year period. We show, for the first time, that fingerprints acquired from a child as young as 6-h old exhibit distinguishing features necessary for recognition, and that state-of-the-art fingerprint technology achieves high recognition accuracy (98.9% true accept rate at 0.1% false accept rate) for children older than six months. In addition, we use mixed-effects statistical models to study the persistence of child fingerprint recognition accuracy and show that the recognition accuracy is not significantly affected over the one year time lapse in our data. Given rapidly growing requirements to recognize children for vaccination tracking, delivery of supplementary food, and national identification documents, this paper demonstrates that fingerprint recognition of young children (six months and older) is a viable solution based on available capture and recognition technology.