Authors: Yifan Wang, Jie Gui, Adams Wai Kin Kong, Baosheng Yu, Changsheng Chen, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun, James Tin-Yau Kwok, +1 more
Organizations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210000, China · Engineering Research Center of Blockchain Application, Supervision and Management (Southeast University), Ministry of Education; Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 210000, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · Faculty of Engineering, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Shenzhen 518000, China · New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and the State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong 999077, China · VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam 100000
A major challenge in finger vein recognition is the lack of large-scale public datasets. Existing datasets contain few identities and limited samples per finger, restricting the advancement of deep learning-based methods. To address this, we propose FVeinSyn, a large-scale controllable synthetic data generation framework for finger vein. It explicitly decouples synthesis of vascular topology and imaging appearance to mitigate the limitations caused by insufficient training samples, such as inadequate identity diversity and restricted realism. Specifically: first, a finger vein identity generator models vascular topology under physiological and geometric constraints using stochastic L-systems, producing anatomically valid and identity-distinctive vascular patterns. Then, a cascaded region-aware GAN renders the topological maps into realistic near-infrared images. Finally, an intra-class diversity generator introduces geometric and optical perturbations to simulate realistic intra-class variations. Using FVeinSyn, we generated 500,000 images (10,000 vein identities, 50 samples per identity) and conducted extensive evaluations. Results show that FVeinSyn holds significant advantages in realism, identity diversity, vascular pattern consistency, and intra-class diversity. Models trained with FVeinSyn outperform real-data-only baselines a cross eight public datasets, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 27.43%. The code is available at: https://github.com/EvanWang98/Synthetic-Finger-Vein-Generator.
Fig. 2: Traditional modeling (left): vessels are unsmooth and rigid, with unrealistic infrared appearance. Learning-based (right): noticeable artifacts are observed.
Fig. 4: Overview of the FVeinSyn framework for large-scale synthetic finger vein image generation. 1) Finger Vein Identity Generator, where unique vascular topologies are created. 2) Grayscale Finger Vein Image Render, performed by a Cascaded Region-Aware GAN (CascadedRA-GAN) to produce realistic images. 3) Intra-Class Diversity Generation, which applies geometric and optical perturbations to enhance variability within each identity.
Operator
Params
Range / distribution
Default
Notes
Translation
tx
U(−τwW,τwW)
τw=0.05
horizontal displacement
ty
U(−τhH,τhH)
τh=0.05
vertical displacement
Rotation
ϕ
U(−ϕmax,ϕmax)
ϕmax=15∘
rotation angle
Rolling
ψ
U(−ψmax,ψmax)
ψmax=10∘
rolling angle
Scaling
s
U(1±smax)
sm=0.1
scale factor
Exposure
v0
U(−vmax,vmax)
vmax=2
exposure intensity
TABLE I: Parameterization for ICDG operators. U(a,b) denotes the uniform distribution over the interval [a,b] . W , H are width and height, τ is the translation factor.
Fig. 5: Comparison between real and synthetic finger vein images generated by FVeinSyn. From left to right: SDUMLA-FV, UTFVP, MMCBNU_6000, PLUS-FV3, FV-USM, HKPU-FV, SCUT-FV3, THU-FV3, and FVeinSyn generate synthetic finger vein images (two columns).
Fig. 6: Vein pattern extraction results on real and synthetic finger vein images using classical methods, including RLT, MC, Gabor filter, and IUWT. From top to bottom: FVeinSyn-generated synthetic finger vein images (two rows), SDUMLA-FV, UTFVP, MMCBNU_6000, PLUS-FV3, FV-USM, HKPU-FV, SCUT-FV3, and THU-FV3.
Metrics
Real Datasets
Synthetic Datasets
SDUMLA-FV
UTFVP
MMCBNU_6000
PLUS-FV3
FV-USM
HKPU-FV
SCUT-FV
THU-FV3
Avg.
Ou et al. [ 38 ]
BTUSyn [ 37 ]
FVeinSyn(Our)
GCF
2.02
2.50
2.43
2.26
1.35
2.73
1.99
2.33
2.16
1.64
1.95
2.40
Entropy
6.62
7.16
6.84
6.33
6.08
6.88
6.44
6.58
6.64
6.45
6.67
7.06
Tenengrad
18.96
26.31
11.79
26.92
7.96
19.83
11.87
25.26
18.73
15.61
13.09
24.12
NIQE
30.28
31.18
32.74
24.84
31.86
31.53
31.53
33.27
31.16
27.02
29.90
28.59
BRISQUE
53.11
46.09
67.52
57.56
61.46
67.08
69.00
35.89
56.94
58.94
88.37
44.72
TABLE II: Comparison of image quality metrics across different finger vein datasets.
Fig. 7: Global contrast factor, Entropy, and Tenengrad gradient distributions of image quality metrics for real and synthetic finger vein datasets.
Method
Region
Avg. Realism Rating
Std. Dev.
BTUSyn [ 37 ]
ROI
3.74
0.60
Ou et al. [ 38 ]
ROI
4.61
0.78
FVeinSyn (Our)
ROI
5.65
0.53
FVeinSyn (Our)
Full Finger
7.11
0.56
TABLE III: Average realism ratings of different synthesis methods (9 = Most Realistic, 1 = Least Realistic)
Method
Region
Average Rating (%)
Std. Dev. (%)
BTUSyn [ 37 ]
ROI
20.50
14.80
Ou et al. [ 38 ]
ROI
40.84
16.23
FVeinSyn (Our)
ROI
82.97
10.98
FVeinSyn (Our)
Full Finger
90.54
8.03
TABLE IV: percentage classified as real per synthesis data
Method
Configs
Performance (TAR@FAR=1e-3) ↑
#IDs
#per ID
#Image
SDUMLA-FV
UTFVP
MMCBNU_6000
PLUS-FV3
FV-USM
HKPU-FV
SCUT-FV3
THU-FV3
Avg.
MC
-
-
-
0.3117
0.5593
0.7669
0.6895
0.7632
0.3066
0.6261
0.5016
0.5656
RLT
-
-
-
0.4006
0.7093
0.7650
0.5363
0.8406
0.4753
0.5853
0.5788
0.6114
IUWT
-
-
-
0.4273
0.8269
0.7951
0.6190
0.7955
0.5758
0.5775
0.5405
0.6447
GF
-
-
-
0.3820
0.7232
0.8640
0.5104
0.8585
0.4743
0.5721
0.6158
0.6250
Real data
1.9k
-
18k
0.4602
0.7593
0.8385
0.5385
0.7709
0.6447
0.5504
0.5799
0.6428
TABLE V: Performance comparison of various enhancement or synthesis methods for finger vein recognition
Fig. 8: Comparison of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and equal error rates (EERs) for FVeinSyn and other representative methods under the open-set finger vein recognition protocol.
TABLE VI: Cross-dataset evaluation using or not using FVeinSyn for pre-training. ✔indicates that pre-training with synthetic data is used (TAR@FAR=1e-3) ↑
TABLE VII: Performance comparison with increasing training samples (TAR@FAR=1e-3) ↑
Fig. 9: Comparison of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and equal error rates (EERs) for FVeinSyn and other representative methods under the limited finger vein sample recognition protocol.
Dataset
Uclass
Cintra
Dintra
Ou et al. [ 38 ]
24.57
–
–
BTUSyn [ 37 ]
19.19
99.98
3.28
FVeinSyn (Our)
99.83
100.00
89.67
TABLE IX: Dataset Evaluation of Synthetic Finger Vein
Fig. 10: Genuine/Impostor matching score distributions across multiple real datasets and the FVeinSyn synthetic dataset.
Fig. 11: Distribution of the number of intra-class variations in 500,000 FVeinSyn generated samples.
Intra-Class Variation
SDUMLA-FV
UTFVP
MMCBNU_60000
PLUS-FV3
FV-USM
HKPU-FV
SCUT-FV
THU-FV3
Avg.
Real data
0.4602
0.7593
0.8385
0.5385
0.7709
0.6447
0.5504
0.5799
0.6428
FVeinSyn (Mixed)
0.9402
0.9778
0.9538
0.9132
0.9551
0.9655
0.7078
0.9233
0.9171
Geometric Perturbations
Shift
0.8994
0.9528
0.9395
0.8749
0.9009
0.9264
0.6642
0.8736
0.8789
Rotation
0.9283
0.9528
0.9209
0.8086
0.8875
0.8850
0.6965
0.8371
0.8646
Rolling
0.9107
0.9509
0.8901
0.8619
0.8726
0.8545
0.6675
0.7963
0.8506
TABLE X: Impact of different intra-class variations on recognition performance across datasets (TAR@FAR= 10−3 ) ↑ .
Dataset
PT w/ Syn
Gender
Age
Race
Blood Type
✗
✔
Male
Female
≤ 20
21–40
≥ 41
Asian
Caucasian
African
A
B
AB
O
UTFVP
0.7593
0.9778
0.9822
0.9222
0.9815
0.9759
0.9514
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
MMCBNU_6000
0.8385
0.9538
0.9458
0.9876
1.0000
0.9494
0.9605
0.9542
0.9531
0.9741
0.9407
0.9874
0.9704
0.9663
TABLE XI: Demographic Fairness Analysis of Recognition Performance with Synthetic Data (TAR@FAR= 10−3 ) ↑ .
Step
Identity Generation
Render
Diversity Generation
Total
Time (ms)
285.6
7.9
0.7
294.2
TABLE XII: Time consumption of Finger Vein Image Sample using FVeinSyn
Finger vein verification is a promising biometric modality for secure authentication because vascular patterns are internal, difficult to observe externally, and relatively resistant to presentation attacks. However, reliable verification remains challenging in open-set settings, where test identities are unseen during training and non-enrolled probes must be rejected at inference. This paper presents OpenVeinNet, a finger vein verification framework designed for cross-dataset and open-set evaluation. The proposed model combines Dynamic Snake Convolution with graph-based feature modelling. Dynamic Snake Convolution extracts local curvilinear and tubular vein structures using adaptive sampling, while the graph convolutional backbone models long-range topological relationships between vein regions. To improve the discriminative quality of the embedding space, we introduce a Centroid Angular Hybrid Loss, which jointly encourages intra-class compactness and inter-class angular separation for cosinesimilaritybased verification. Experiments are conducted on five public finger vein datasets: FV-300, MMCBNU, FV-USM, PolyU, and VERA. The method is evaluated using leaveonedatasetout training under both enrolmentbased unknownrejection and fullsubject verification protocols, and is compared with handcrafted and recent deep learning-based baselines. The results show that OpenVeinNet achieves strong cross-dataset generalisation, consistently low equal error rates, and competitive true accept rates at fixed false accept rate operating points. Ablation studies further confirm the individual and combined contributions of adaptive tubular feature extraction, graph-based relational modelling, and the proposed loss function. These findings indicate that explicitly modelling local vein geometry, global vascular relationships, and angularly compact embeddings is effective for openset finger vein verification.
Sushrut Patwardhan, Raghavendra Ramachandra
SAFE Centre, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology (IIK), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway.
Age estimation from finger vein images has been widely considered impractical due to severe demographic biases in public datasets and physiological confounding factors like gender. To overcome these limitations, we propose MAGE-Vein, a novel multi-instance, multi-task learning framework. Our approach extracts robust structural aging signs by employing a hybrid feature-level fusion of three fingers, effectively suppressing local imaging noise. Furthermore, simultaneous optimization of gender classification conditions the network to effectively eliminate gender-specific vascular variations. Evaluated on a demographically balanced dataset of 402 subjects, MAGE-Vein achieves a mean absolute error of 6.12 years and a correlation of 0.880. Our results not only overturn the conventional consensus regarding the limitations of the finger vein modality but also demonstrate that previous estimation failures were primarily artifacts of biased public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/gsisaoki/MAGE-Vein.
Katsuki Tanaka, Koichi Ito, Takafumi Aoki +4
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan. · Hitachi, Ltd., Japan.
Synthetic data provides a scalable alternative to real-world datasets for training face recognition models, particularly under challenging conditions such as low resolution, occlusion, and masks. Yet, most approaches lack diversity and fail to generalize effectively. We propose Ensemble Feedback Controllable Synthesis (EFCS), a guided framework that generates diverse and challenging samples while preserving visual realism. EFCS expands distributional variability, often reflected in higher FID and KID scores compared to single-feedback and random synthesis, while maintaining high precision. Recognition models trained on EFCS data consistently outperform baselines across multiple benchmarks, showing improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce an analytically motivated formulation linking perturbation-induced difficulty, sample utility, and performance degradation, offering principled insights into balancing synthetic data complexity for optimal training. Together, these contributions establish EFCS as an effective and analytically grounded approach for bridging the gap between synthetic and real datasets.
Saransh Suri, Shivang Agarwal, Mayank Vatsa +1
Manipal University Jaipur, India · Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India · Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani Dubai Campus, Dubai, United Arab Emirates