  With a number of emerging applications requiring biometric recognition of
children (e.g., tracking child vaccination schedules, identifying missing
children and preventing newborn baby swaps in hospitals), investigating the
temporal stability of biometric recognition accuracy for children is important.
The persistence of recognition accuracy of three of the most commonly used
biometric traits (fingerprints, face and iris) has been investigated for
adults. However, persistence of biometric recognition accuracy has not been
studied systematically for children in the age group of 0-4 years. Given that
very young children are often uncooperative and do not comprehend or follow
instructions, in our opinion, among all biometric modalities, fingerprints are
the most viable for recognizing children. This is primarily because it is
easier to capture fingerprints of young children compared to other biometric
traits, e.g., iris, where a child needs to stare directly towards the camera to
initiate iris capture. In this report, we detail our initiative to investigate
the persistence of fingerprint recognition for children in the age group of 0-4
years. Based on preliminary results obtained for the data collected in the
first phase of our study, use of fingerprints for recognition of 0-4 year-old
children appears promising.
