June 14, 2019
MSU researchers introduce custom, compact, low-cost fingerprint reader to help reduce infant mortality
A team of researchers from Michigan State University will showcase a low-cost, high-resolution and portable solution called Infant-Prints to accurately identify infants in an effort to help reduce infant mortality around the world.
University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Anil Jain is leading a group of scientists from MSU and Dayalbagh, India, that will introduce Infant-Prints at two upcoming international conferences. (See Infant-Print video.)
Their work will be presented June 16 in a special workshop at the 2019 Computer Vision for Global Challenges (CV4GC), sponsored by Facebook AI and in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), in Long Beach, California.
Additionally, Jain will chair an academic session on June 19 on Infant Biometrics at ID4Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. ID4Africa is part of Africa’s ID-4-All movement to develop digital identity ecosystems for improved humanitarian action and security.
Jain said Infant-Prints is a complete infant fingerprint recognition system with a low-cost, custom, high-resolution fingerprint reader, a new high-resolution, texture-based infant fingerprint matching algorithm, and an Android application for verifying an infant’s identity in real-time.
“Children born in least developed and developing countries are subject to a lack of proper record keeping that prevents urgently needed health care and nutrition supplements to improve infant mortality. By the age of five, more than 5 million children each year lose their lives to vaccine-preventable diseases alone,” Jain explained.
“The lack of any official identification documentation makes it exceedingly difficult to identify and track at-risk infants. The complete system of a high-resolution (1900 ppi), low-cost ($85) fingerprint reader and matcher running on a mobile application allows for accurate record keeping and proper delivery of vaccination, health care, and nutrition to needy infants,” he continued. “For this reason, a biometric-based infant ID system is of immense interest to all the NGOs, international agencies, and governments in least developed and developing countries around the globe.
“Our goal is to transfer the Infant-Prints prototype system to an organization for extensive evaluation and deployment in least developed and developing countries. Accurate and reliable recognition of infants will provide for effective delivery of critical vaccinations and nutritional supplements in time,” he added.
Jain’s research team includes MSU PhD students Joshua J. Engelsma and Debayan Deb working in collaboration with Doctors Anjoo Bhatnagar at Saran Ashram Hospital and Prem S. Sudhish at Dayalbagh Educational Institute in Agra, India.
For more on Infant-Prints, read the abstract.
