  Motion blur, out of focus, insufficient spatial resolution, lossy compression
and many other factors can all cause an image to have poor quality. However,
image quality is a largely ignored issue in traditional pattern recognition
literature. In this paper, we use face detection and recognition as case
studies to show that image quality is an essential factor which will affect the
performances of traditional algorithms. We demonstrated that it is not the
image quality itself that is the most important, but rather the quality of the
images in the training set should have similar quality as those in the testing
set. To handle real-world application scenarios where images with different
kinds and severities of degradation can be presented to the system, we have
developed a quality classified image analysis framework to deal with images of
mixed qualities adaptively. We use deep neural networks first to classify
images based on their quality classes and then design a separate face detector
and recognizer for images in each quality class. We will present experimental
results to show that our quality classified framework can accurately classify
images based on the type and severity of image degradations and can
significantly boost the performances of state-of-the-art face detector and
recognizer in dealing with image datasets containing mixed quality images.
