  In this paper we develop a Quality Assessment approach for face recognition
based on deep learning. The method consists of a Convolutional Neural Network,
FaceQnet, that is used to predict the suitability of a specific input image for
face recognition purposes. The training of FaceQnet is done using the VGGFace2
database. We employ the BioLab-ICAO framework for labeling the VGGFace2 images
with quality information related to their ICAO compliance level. The
groundtruth quality labels are obtained using FaceNet to generate comparison
scores. We employ the groundtruth data to fine-tune a ResNet-based CNN, making
it capable of returning a numerical quality measure for each input image.
Finally, we verify if the FaceQnet scores are suitable to predict the expected
performance when employing a specific image for face recognition with a COTS
face recognition system. Several conclusions can be drawn from this work, most
notably: 1) we managed to employ an existing ICAO compliance framework and a
pretrained CNN to automatically label data with quality information, 2) we
trained FaceQnet for quality estimation by fine-tuning a pre-trained face
recognition network (ResNet-50), and 3) we have shown that the predictions from
FaceQnet are highly correlated with the face recognition accuracy of a
state-of-the-art commercial system not used during development. FaceQnet is
publicly available in GitHub.
