  We present the first method for synthetic generation of contactless
fingerprint images, referred to as SynCoLFinGer. To this end, the constituent
components of contactless fingerprint images regarding capturing, subject
characteristics, and environmental influences are modeled and applied to a
synthetically generated ridge pattern using the SFinGe algorithm. The proposed
method is able to generate different synthetic samples corresponding to a
single finger and it can be parameterized to generate contactless fingerprint
images of various quality levels. The resemblance of the synthetically
generated contactless fingerprints to real fingerprints is confirmed by
evaluating biometric sample quality using an adapted NFIQ 2.0 algorithm and
biometric utility using a state-of-the-art contactless fingerprint recognition
system.
