Employing Vision-Language Models for Face Image Quality Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sarıtaş, Erdi, Onaran, Eren, Štruc, Vitomir, Ekenel, Hazım Kemal
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sarıtaş, Erdi
Onaran, Eren
Štruc, Vitomir
Ekenel, Hazım Kemal
author_facet Sarıtaş, Erdi
Onaran, Eren
Štruc, Vitomir
Ekenel, Hazım Kemal
contents Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) is a crucial control step in biometric pipelines. It ensures only reliable samples are processed to maintain system accuracy. State-of-the-art FIQA methods achieve high utility but typically operate as "black boxes." They produce scalar scores without human-interpretable justifications. This lack of transparency limits their effectiveness in human-in-the-loop scenarios, such as automated border control, where actionable feedback is essential. In this paper, we investigate the potential of off-the-shelf Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge this gap by performing FIQA in a zero-shot setting. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing VLM performance. This involves benchmarking traditional FIQA methods through error-versus-reject curves. Additionally, using a diverse set of datasets, ranging from surveillance-oriented to synthetically generated, we analyzed their interpretability, consistency, and robustness to prompt changes. Our results show biometric utility performance depends significantly on architecture, not merely on parameter count. Most VLMs' outputs align with those of traditional methods. We also find that VLM ranking performance and the generated scores may vary across prompts. Our synthetic ablation study shows that while increasing the parameter count can improve internal consistency, it yields worse degradation-detection performance than smaller models. These findings suggest that zero-shot FIQA score estimation using VLMs is promising and could effectively complement conventional FIQA pipelines as an interpretability module. The codes are available at https://github.com/ThEnded32/VLM4FIQA.git.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Employing Vision-Language Models for Face Image Quality Assessment
Sarıtaş, Erdi
Onaran, Eren
Štruc, Vitomir
Ekenel, Hazım Kemal
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) is a crucial control step in biometric pipelines. It ensures only reliable samples are processed to maintain system accuracy. State-of-the-art FIQA methods achieve high utility but typically operate as "black boxes." They produce scalar scores without human-interpretable justifications. This lack of transparency limits their effectiveness in human-in-the-loop scenarios, such as automated border control, where actionable feedback is essential. In this paper, we investigate the potential of off-the-shelf Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge this gap by performing FIQA in a zero-shot setting. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing VLM performance. This involves benchmarking traditional FIQA methods through error-versus-reject curves. Additionally, using a diverse set of datasets, ranging from surveillance-oriented to synthetically generated, we analyzed their interpretability, consistency, and robustness to prompt changes. Our results show biometric utility performance depends significantly on architecture, not merely on parameter count. Most VLMs' outputs align with those of traditional methods. We also find that VLM ranking performance and the generated scores may vary across prompts. Our synthetic ablation study shows that while increasing the parameter count can improve internal consistency, it yields worse degradation-detection performance than smaller models. These findings suggest that zero-shot FIQA score estimation using VLMs is promising and could effectively complement conventional FIQA pipelines as an interpretability module. The codes are available at https://github.com/ThEnded32/VLM4FIQA.git.
title Employing Vision-Language Models for Face Image Quality Assessment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17489