Development of 2,400ppi Fingerprint Sensor for Capturing Neonate Fingerprint within 24 Hours after Birth

United Nations adopted the resolution “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” which aims at solving the eradicating the poverty in all its forms and dimensions. One of the action plans is listed at “Goal 16 Target 16.9,” which clearly directs “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” A fingerprint identification technology is one of the best solutions from the viewpoint of making a reliable identification system for the birth registration. However, collecting the fingerprint data from neonates is currently considered as one of the most difficult technology areas. Addressing this problem, we develop a novel high-resolution fingerprint sensor, whose image resolution is 2,400ppi. We collect fingerprint images from neonates within 24 hours after birth through the field research in Kenya. The experiments using our dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our fingerprint sensor in neonate identification compared with 500ppi and 1,270ppi fingerprint sensors.