PCE-Palm: Palm Crease Energy Based Two-Stage Realistic Pseudo-Palmprint Generation

The lack of large-scale data seriously hinders the development of palmprint recognition. Recent approaches address this issue by generating large-scale realistic pseudo palmprints from Bézier curves. However, the significant difference between Bézier curves and real palmprints limits their effectiveness. In this paper, we divide the Bézier-Real difference into creases and texture differences, thus reducing the generation difficulty. We introduce a new palm crease energy (PCE) domain as a bridge from Bézier curves to real palmprints and propose a two-stage generation model. The first stage generates PCE images (realistic creases) from Bézier curves, and the second stage outputs realistic palmprints (realistic texture) with PCE images as input. In addition, we also design a lightweight plug-and-play line feature enhancement block to facilitate domain transfer and improve recognition performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Under extremely few data settings like 40 IDs (only 2.5% of the total training set), our model achieves a 29% improvement over RPG-Palm and outperforms ArcFace with 100% training set by more than 6% in terms of TAR@FAR=1e-6.