Can face and soft-biometric traits assist in recognition of newborn?

Most of the biometric research being done is for adults and the identification accuracy of newborn are least reported in the literatures. In this paper we propose a novel biometric identification method for newborn babies using their face and soft biometrics. Accurate patient identification (ID) is essential for patient safety, especially with our smallest and most vulnerable pediatric patients. The main contribution of the research are (a) the preparation of face and soft biometric database of newborn. (b) Testing the algorithm for identification of 210 newborn. The combined use of all the four soft biometric traits results in an improvement of approximately 6% over the primary biometric system.