A Feasibility Study on Utilizing Toe Prints for Biometric Verification of Children

Biometric recognition allows a person to be identified by comparing feature vectors derived from a person's physiological characteristics. Recognition is dependent on the permanence of the biometric characteristics over long periods of time. There was been limited work evaluating the footprint as a potential biometric. This paper presents a longitudinal study of toe prints in children to understand if this biometric modality could be used reliably as a child grows. Data was collected and analyzed in children ages 4-13 years over five visits, spaced approximately six months apart, giving two years of data. This is the first footprint collection spanning this broad age range in children. Footprints were segmented into separate toe prints to examine whether current fingerprint recognition technology can provide accurate results on toe prints. Data was analyzed using two available fingerprint matchers, Verifinger and Bozorth3 from NIST Biometric Image Software (NBIS). Verifinger provides the best verification match scores using the toe prints, especially when using the hallux, the large toe. The hallux toe on Verifinger provides verification rates of 0% FAR and FRR for images collected on the same day and a FRR of 6.44% at a 1% FAR after two years have passed between collections. Additional longitudinal data is being collected to further these results.