Automatic Face Recognition of Newborns, Infants, and Toddlers: A Longitudinal Evaluation

A number of emerging applications requiring reliable identification of children have called attention to whether biometric traits can be utilized as a solution. While biometric traits based on friction ridge patterns (e.g. fingerprints, footprints) have been evaluated to some extent, to our knowledge, no effort has been made to evaluate the efficacy of automatic face recognition of young children over useful durations of time. Additionally, there are some applications where only the face images of a child are available, such as identification of missing or abducted children and children shown in sexually exploitive media sequestered by law enforcement. In this paper, we introduce the Newborns, Infants, and Toddlers Longitudinal (NITL) face image database, which was collected by the authors during four different sessions over a period of one year (March 2015 to March 2016) at the Saran Ashram Hospital, Dayalbagh, India. The NITL database contains 314 subjects in total in the age range of 0 to 4 years old. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of a state-of-the-art commercial-off- the-shelf (COTS) face matcher on the NITL face image database to investigate the feasibility of face recognition of children as they age. Experimental results show that while available face recognition technology is not yet ready to reliably recognize very young children, face recognition enrolled at 3 years of age or older may be feasible.