Fusion of Ear and Soft-biometrics for Recognition of Newborn

Recognition of newborn after birth is a critical issue for hospitals, maternity word and other places where multiple birthstake place. Switching and abduction of newborn is a global challenge and research done to meet this challenge is minimal. Most of the biometric systems developed are for adults and very few of them address the issue of newborn identification.The ear of newborn is a perfect source of data for passive identification of newborn as they are the highly non cooperative users of biometrics. The four important characteristics of ear biometrics: universality, uniqueness, permanence and collectability make it a very potential biometric trait for the identification of newborn. Further the use of soft-biometric data like gender, blood group, height and weight along with ear enhances the accuracy for identification of newborn. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the concept of fusing earand soft-biometrics for recognition of newborn. The main contributions of the research are (a) Design and implementation for fusion of ear and soft biometric for recognition of 210 newborn. (b)Preparation of ear and soft-biometric database of newborn. Fusion of ear and soft-biometrics results in an improvement of approximately 5.59% over the primary biometric system i.e. ear.