Non-invasive, efficient, physical token-less, accurate and stable identification methods for newborns may prevent baby swapping at birth, limit baby abductions and improve post-natal health monitoring across geographies, within the context of both the formal (i.e., hospitals) and informal (i.e., humanitarian and fragile settings) health sectors. This paper explores the feasibility of application iris recognition to build biometric identifiers for 4-6 week old infants. We (a) collected near infrared (NIR) iris images from 17 infants using a specially-designed NIR iris sensor; (b) evaluated six iris recognition methods to assess readiness of the state-of-the-art iris recognition to be applied to newborns and infants; (c) proposed a new segmentation model that correctly detects iris texture within infants iris images, and coupled it with several iris texture encoding approaches to offer, to the first of our knowledge, a fully-operational infant iris recognition system; and, (d) trained a StyleGAN-based model to synthesize iris images mimicking samples acquired from infants to deliver to the research community privacy-safe infant iris images. The proposed system, incorporating the specially-designed iris sensor and segmenter, and applied to the collected infant iris samples, achieved Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3\% and Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) of 99\%, compared to EER$\geq$20\% and AUC$\leq$88\% obtained for state of the art adult iris recognition systems. This suggests that it may be feasible to design methods that succesfully extract biometric features from infant irises.

翻译：针对新生儿开发非侵入性、高效、无需物理令牌、准确且稳定的身份识别方法，可在正规（如医院）与非正规（如人道主义及脆弱环境）卫生体系背景下，有效防止出生时婴儿错换、减少婴儿拐卖事件，并促进跨地域的产后健康监测。本文探讨了应用虹膜识别技术为4-6周龄婴儿构建生物特征标识的可行性。我们（a）使用专门设计的近红外虹膜传感器采集了17名婴儿的近红外虹膜图像；（b）评估了六种虹膜识别方法，以检验当前最先进的虹膜识别技术应用于新生儿及婴儿的成熟度；（c）提出了一种新的分割模型，能够准确检测婴儿虹膜图像中的纹理结构，并结合多种虹膜纹理编码方法，首次构建了完整可运行的婴儿虹膜识别系统；（d）训练了基于StyleGAN的模型以合成模拟婴儿虹膜样本的图像，为研究界提供隐私安全的婴儿虹膜图像数据。所提出的系统整合了专用虹膜传感器与分割器，应用于采集的婴儿虹膜样本后，实现了3%的等错误率与99%的ROC曲线下面积，而当前最先进的成人虹膜识别系统在此类样本上的等错误率≥20%、ROC曲线下面积≤88%。这表明设计能够成功从婴儿虹膜中提取生物特征的方法具有可行性。