Biometric recognition is often used for adults for a variety of purposes where an individual's identity must be ascertained. However, the biometric recognition of children is an unsolved challenge. Solving this challenge could protect children from identity theft and identity fraud, help in reuniting lost children with their parents, improve border control systems in combatting child trafficking, and assist in electronic record-keeping systems. In order to begin the development of biometric recognition systems for children, researchers collected fingerprint, iris, and outer ear shape biometric information from infants. Each modality provides different challenges. Where possible, the performance of existing hardware and software that was developed for adults was assessed with infants. Where necessary, novel hardware or software was developed. For the ear modality, existing hardware and software which have previously been applied to adults were applied to children. For the iris modality, existing hardware was used to acquire the images, while adjustments to the existing preprocessing algorithms were applied to cater for the localisation and segmentation of infant irises. For the fingerprint modality, novel hardware and image processing software were developed to acquire fingerprints from infants, and convert the images into a format which is backward compatible with existing international standards for minutiae extraction and comparison. The advantages and disadvantages of using each of these modalities during the first year of life were compared, based on both qualitative assessments of usage, and quantitative assessments of performance. While there is no conclusively best modality, recommendations of usage for each modality were provided.

No abstract

No abstract

Collecting relevant data is an important aspect in allowing evaluation of the performance of systems, methods, algorithms, and techniques developed in the research process. Researchers at the South African Scientific and Industrial Research Council perfoemd a study to identify biometric(s) that can be used to identify and verify young children from birth to 16 years old. Three types of biometrics were considered in this study as a resukt of a comprehensive preliminary research, namely, fingerprins, iris and ear shap. This paper presents challenges identified and lessons learned during the in trying to collect data for scientific research that require interaction with children of different ages and their parents in different environments. . The study is primarily based on researcher’s experiences. Some of the discussion points discussed are of global relevance to children and general human beings, while others relate to South Africa in particular. The discussion aims to share knowledge and experience, hoping that this will help researchers prepare for a trouble-free child data collection process in the future. Keywords: Baby biometrics; long-term data collection, baby fingerprints, baby iris, baby ears

No abstract