Learning Face Image Quality From Human Assessments

Face image quality can be defined as a measure of the utility of a face image to automatic face recognition. In this paper, we propose (and compare) two methods for learning face image quality based on target face quality values from: 1) human assessments of face image quality (matcher-independent) and 2) quality values computed from similarity scores (matcher-dependent). A support vector regression model trained on face features extracted using a deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) is used to predict the quality of a face image. The proposed methods are evaluated on two unconstrained face image databases, Labeled Faces in the Wild and IARPA Janus Benchmark-A (IJB-A), which both contain facial variations encompassing a multitude of quality factors. Evaluation of the proposed automatic face image quality measures shows we are able to reduce the false non-match rate at 1% false match rate by at least 13% for two face matchers (a commercial off-the-shelf matcher and a ConvNet matcher) by using the proposed face quality to select subsets of face images and video frames for matching templates (i.e., multiple faces per subject) in the IJB-A protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize human assessments of face image quality in designing a predictor of unconstrained face quality that is shown to be effective in cross-database evaluation.