Identity-Consistent Multi-Pose Generation of Contactless Fingerprints

arXiv cs.CV / 5/6/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses contactless fingerprint recognition by tackling nonlinear geometric distortions and a cross-modal domain gap caused by free 3D finger poses without physical contact.
  • It introduces IMPOSE, a physics-inspired framework that synthesizes identity-preserving multi-pose contactless fingerprints through a three-stage pipeline: latent diffusion identity generation, rolled-to-contactless translation using Sauvola-based binarization as an identity anchor, and physics-based 3D multi-pose simulation.
  • IMPOSE is designed to preserve identity consistency at the ridge topology level and align synthesized samples to the standard fingerprint coordinate space.
  • Experiments on UWA and PolyU CL2CB show strong improvements for cross-modal matching when using IMPOSE-synthesized data to fine-tune fixed-length dense descriptors (FDD), achieving EER of 8.74% (UWA) and 2.26% (PolyU CL2CB).
  • Synthetic data benefits multiple fingerprint representations (e.g., DeepPrint and AFRNet), and combining synthetic and real data yields the best overall performance; the project provides code and generated samples on GitHub.

Abstract

Contactless fingerprint recognition has gained increasing attention due to its advantages in hygiene and acquisition flexibility. However, the absence of physical contact constraints introduces severe nonlinear geometric distortions caused by free finger poses in 3D space, resulting in a substantial cross-modal domain gap between contactless and conventional contact-based fingerprints. Existing solutions largely rely on explicit geometric correction or image enhancement, which are fragile under extreme pose variations. In this paper, we propose Identity-Consistent Multi-Pose Generation of Contactless Fingerprints (IMPOSE), a physics-inspired framework that synthesizes identity-preserving, multi-pose contactless fingerprint samples to empower recognition models. IMPOSE consists of three stages: (1) rolled fingerprint identity generation via latent diffusion with discrete codebook representations, (2) cross-modal translation from rolled to contactless modality guided by Sauvola-based local adaptive binarization as an identity anchor, and (3) physics-based multi-pose simulation through 3D finger model texture mapping and projection. The generated samples maintain strict identity consistency at the ridge topology level and spatial alignment with standard fingerprint coordinate space. Extensive experiments on the UWA and PolyU CL2CB databases demonstrate that fine-tuning fixed-length dense descriptors (FDD) with IMPOSE-synthesized data achieves state-of-the-art cross-modal matching, reducing EER to 8.74% on UWA and 2.26% on PolyU CL2CB. Synthetic data also yields consistent gains across mainstream representations including DeepPrint and AFRNet, and the hybrid strategy combining synthetic and real data achieves the best overall results. The code and generated samples are available at https://github.com/Yu-Yy/IMPOSE.