Lepers personal identification using the soleprint in place of fingerprint

The fingerprint has been a major form of infallible mode of personal identification for a long time now. However, some lepers have been left out in the cause of using this mode. The problem of personal identification based on soleprint for leprosy victims who have no fingers and toes have been addressed. This paper presents analysis based on the discovery of a point on the sole adjacent to the big toe, at the flat space just behind the toes that has features similar to that on the fingerprint that could be used for identification purposes. In all, the 2 soles of 120 individuals amounting to 240 soleprints are collected for the experiment. The analysis revealed that all the six classes; left loop, right loop, double loop, tented arch, arch, and whorl usable for classification are also present on the soleprint. In this experiment, analysis was carried out to compare fingerprint and soleprint classes. From the experiment, it was found out that the soleprints has about 52 recognizable minutiae (Fig. 1), which can be summarized into two - the ridge-ending and ridge-bifurcation-(This characteristic is similar to that of fingerprint). The whorl is 44.2% and the highest in population among the 240 studied soleprint in this experiment, followed by loop of 35.8% and the arch is the least with 20%.