A Deep Insight into Measuring Face Image Utility with General and Face-specific Image Quality Metrics

Quality scores provide a measure to evaluate the utility of biometric samples for biometric recognition. Biometric recognition systems require high-quality samples to achieve optimal performance. This paper focuses on face images and the measurement of face image utility with general and face-specific image quality metrics. While face-specific metrics rely on features of aligned face images, general image quality metrics can be used on the global image and relate to human perceptions. In this paper, we analyze the gap between the general image quality metrics and the face image quality metrics. Our contribution lies in a thorough examination of how different the image quality assessment algorithms relate to the utility for the face recognition task. The results of image quality assessment algorithms are further compared with those of dedicated face image quality assessment algorithms. In total, 25 different quality metrics are evaluated on three face image databases, BioSecure, LFW, and VGGFace2 using three open-source face recognition solutions, SphereFace, ArcFace, and FaceNet. Our results reveal a clear correlation between learned image metrics to face image utility even without being specifically trained as a face utility measure. Individual handcrafted features lack general stability and perform significantly worse than general face-specific quality metrics. We additionally provide a visual insight into the image areas contributing to the quality score of a selected set of quality assessment methods.

Face Image Quality Assessment: A Literature Survey

The performance of face analysis and recognition systems depends on the quality of the acquired face data, which is influenced by numerous factors. Automatically assessing the quality of face data in terms of biometric utility can thus be useful to filter out low quality data. This survey provides an overview of the face quality assessment literature in the framework of face biometrics, with a focus on face recognition based on visible wavelength face images as opposed to e.g. depth or infrared quality assessment. A trend towards deep learning based methods is observed, including notable conceptual differences among the recent approaches. Besides image selection, face image quality assessment can also be used in a variety of other application scenarios, which are discussed herein. Open issues and challenges are pointed out, i.a. highlighting the importance of comparability for algorithm evaluations, and the challenge for future work to create deep learning approaches that are interpretable in addition to providing accurate utility predictions.