In this study we show that current state-of-the-art synthetically generated fingerprints can easily be discriminated from real fingerprints. Tests are conducted on the 12 publicly available databases of FVC2000, FVC2002 and FVC2004 which are important benchmarks for evaluating the performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms; 3 of these 12 databases consist of artificial fingerprints generated by the SFinGe software. We propose a method based on extended minutiae histograms which can distinguish between real and synthetic prints with very high accuracy. This 'test of realness' can be applied to synthetic fingerprints produced by any method. The connection to the knowledge about the biological formation process of finger patterns is discussed and suggestions for the improvement of synthetic fingerprint generation are given. Two additional application areas for extended minutiae histograms are considered: identification and quantifying the weight of fingerprint evidence in court.
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