Generation of Synthetic Fingerphotos with GANs

Contactless fingerprinting is an emerging approach to biometric authentication that allows users to scan their fingerprints without touching a scanner. Due to the limited amount of contactless fingerprint data available and the security risks associated with sharing real individuals' fingerprints, it is valuable to explore methods of generating synthetic data that can be used in place of - or in conjunction with - real data to develop and evaluate contactless fingerprinting systems. In this paper, we present and evaluate synthetic fingerphotos generated using StyleGAN2-ADA and StyleGAN3, existing image generation architectures. We evaluate the realism, privacy preservation, and variety of the synthetic fingerphotos by comparing their biometric feature statistics to those of real fingerphotos, computing match scores between real and synthetic fingerphotos, and computing match scores between different synthetic fingerphotos. This paper provides a quantitative comparison point for future evaluations of synthetic fingerphotos. The evaluation code is made available at https://github.com/cmillerlynch/fingerphoto-gan.