  In many of the least developed and developing countries, a multitude of
infants continue to suffer and die from vaccine-preventable diseases and
malnutrition. Lamentably, the lack of official identification documentation
makes it exceedingly difficult to track which infants have been vaccinated and
which infants have received nutritional supplements. Answering these questions
could prevent this infant suffering and premature death around the world. To
that end, we propose Infant-Prints, an end-to-end, low-cost, infant fingerprint
recognition system. Infant-Prints is comprised of our (i) custom built,
compact, low-cost (85 USD), high-resolution (1,900 ppi), ergonomic fingerprint
reader, and (ii) high-resolution infant fingerprint matcher. To evaluate the
efficacy of Infant-Prints, we collected a longitudinal infant fingerprint
database captured in 4 different sessions over a 12-month time span (December
2018 to January 2020), from 315 infants at the Saran Ashram Hospital, a
charitable hospital in Dayalbagh, Agra, India. Our experimental results
demonstrate, for the first time, that Infant-Prints can deliver accurate and
reliable recognition (over time) of infants enrolled between the ages of 2-3
months, in time for effective delivery of vaccinations, healthcare, and
nutritional supplements (TAR=95.2% @ FAR = 1.0% for infants aged 8-16 weeks at
enrollment and authenticated 3 months later).
