Newborn's ear recognition: Can it be done?

Abduction, swapping and mix ups are the unfortunate events that could happen to infants while in hospital premises and medical personnel are finding it difficult to curb this unfortunate incidents. Existing biometric and non biometric methods fail to provide enough level of security and research done to solve this problem is minimal. This paper introduces the concept of using ear recognition for identification of newborn and presents automatic ear recognition algorithm. The main contribution of this research is (i) preparation of a new born ear database of 210 individuals with slight variations in illumination and pose (ii) testing of different ear matching algorithms. On an ear biometric database of 210 infants it is concluded that ear can be used as biometric feature to identify the newborn.