Toe prints: An application study for biometric verification in adults

Biometric recognition systems provide an easy way to verify an individual's identity through physiological and behavioral biometric traits, due to the persistence of these traits. The physiological traits are extensively utilized to secure the applications of numerous fields. Among these, toe print is one of the physiological traits that has been discussed and evaluated for the children; however, it has not been addressed in the past as this can also be utilized to verify the identity of an adult, especially for a person with different abilities. In this paper, we have come up with a feasibility study of toe prints while comparing them with the impression of a person's different fingers in terms of the overall performance of a biometric verification system. To accomplish this task, the toe print database is collected from different persons of age varying from 17 years to 64 years, which is the first database of its kind and is made available in public domain. Fingerprint impressions are also collected along with the toe print to compare the reliability of the toe print with respect to performance using a standard fingerprint verification tool. Verifinger trial version has been utilized by considering the two standard fingerprint verification protocols viz. 1-vs-1 and FVC to assess the performance of the toe print verification system in terms of the equal error rate (EER). The toe print verification system attains 0.04% and 0.01% EER values for 1-vs-1 and FVC protocol, respectively, which clearly depicts the feasibility of toe print as a potential biometric trait.