Newborn swapping and abduction is a global problem and traditional approaches such as ID bracelets and footprinting do not provide the required level of security. This paper introduces the concept of using face recognition for identifying newborns and presents an automatic face recognition algorithm. The proposed multiresolution algorithm extracts Speeded up robust features and local binary patterns from different levels of Gaussian pyramid. The feature descriptors obtained at each Gaussian level are combined using weighted sum rule. On a newborn face database of 34 babies, the proposed algorithm yields rank-1 identification accuracy of 86.9%. © 2010 IEEE.