Contactless palmprints are comprised of both global and local discriminative features. Most prior work focuses on extracting global features or local features alone for palmprint matching, whereas this research introduces a novel framework that combines global and local features for enhanced palmprint matching accuracy. Leveraging recent advancements in deep learning, this study integrates a vision transformer (ViT) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract complementary local and global features. Next, a mobile-based, end-to-end palmprint recognition system is developed, referred to as Palm-ID. On top of the ViT and CNN features, Palm-ID incorporates a palmprint enhancement module and efficient dimensionality reduction (for faster matching). Palm-ID balances the trade-off between accuracy and latency, requiring just 18ms to extract a template of size 516 bytes, which can be efficiently searched against a 10,000 palmprint gallery in 0.33ms on an AMD EPYC 7543 32-Core CPU utilizing 128-threads. Cross-database matching protocols and evaluations on large-scale operational datasets demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method, achieving a TAR of 98.06% at FAR=0.01% on a newly collected, time-separated dataset. To show a practical deployment of the end-to-end system, the entire recognition pipeline is embedded within a mobile device for enhanced user privacy and security.

Fingerprint recognition systems have been deployed globally in numerous applications including personal devices, forensics, law enforcement, banking, and national identity systems. For these systems to be socially acceptable and trustworthy, it is critical that they perform equally well across different demographic groups. In this work, we propose a formal statistical framework to test for the existence of bias (demographic differentials) in fingerprint recognition across four major demographic groups (white male, white female, black male, and black female) for two state-of-the-art (SOTA) fingerprint matchers operating in verification and identification modes. Experiments on two different fingerprint databases (with 15,468 and 1,014 subjects) show that demographic differentials in SOTA fingerprint recognition systems decrease as the matcher accuracy increases and any small bias that may be evident is likely due to certain outlier, low-quality fingerprint images.