Newborn and infant footprint crease pattern extraction

Medical staff around the world must take reasonable steps to identify newborns and infants clearly, so as to prevent mixups, and to ensure the correct medication reaches the correct child. Footprints are frequently taken despite verification with footprints being challenging due to strong noise. The noise is introduced by the tininess of the structures, movement during capture, and the infant's rapid growth. In this article we address the image processing part of the problem and introduce a novel algorithm for the extraction of creases from infant footprints. The algorithm uses directional filtering on different resolution levels, morphological processing, and block-wise crease line reconstruction. We successfully test our method on noise-affected infant footprints taken from the same infants at different ages.