Canny2Palm: Realistic and Controllable Palmprint Generation for Large-scale Pre-training

Palmprint recognition is a secure and privacy-friendly method of biometric identification. One of the major challenges to improve palmprint recognition accuracy is the scarcity of palmprint data. Recently, a popular line of research revolves around the synthesis of virtual palmprints for large-scale pre-training purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel synthesis method named Canny2Palm that extracts palm textures with Canny edge detector and uses them to condition a Pix2Pix network for realistic palmprint generation. By re-assembling palmprint textures from different identities, we are able to create new identities by seeding the generator with new assemblies. Canny2Palm not only synthesizes realistic data following the distribution of real palmprints but also enables controllable diversity to generate large-scale new identities. On open-set palmprint recognition benchmarks, models pre-trained with Canny2Palm synthetic data outperform the state-of-the-art with up to 7.2% higher identification accuracy. Moreover, the performance of models pre-trained with Canny2Palm continues to improve given 10,000 synthetic IDs while those with existing methods already saturate, demonstrating the potential of our method for large-scale pre-training.