Recognition of Infant Footprint: A Review of Advanced Techniques

“In spite of RFID tags, NICU baby-swapping cannot be prevented.” Across decades, this question has daunted nursing supervisors, pediatric mentors, and newborns’ mothers, thus inspiring a thread of research in this area. The researchers initiated an extensive review and conducted an in-depth survey on related works in the area of infant recognition using biometric features. This led to the culmination of this review paper featuring advanced techniques of infant recognition using footprint techniques. The key focus areas of this paper are surveys on the feasibility of infant biometrics and steps to acquire and process the biometric features specific to infants. Infant biometric identification is the process to identify or verify infants, including newborns and toddlers, to take the necessary decisions in case of any identity crisis. Of all the existing biometric features such as face, fingerprint, and iris that have been more or less explored in the recent past, a footprint linked with the mother’s fingerprint is a new area to be ventured upon. This paper emphasizes the infant footprint biometric as a source of infant recognition, aiming to have multipurpose applications from controlling child vaccination to missing child identification, to name a few. The researchers also focused on research involving advanced techniques like deep learning for infant identification and authentication. The outcome of the review was an extensive study on various research methodologies used by past researchers and a comparative analysis of related work in this field. The work concludes with discussions on the key findings of the study and future research areas that would make infant identification faster and more accurate.