Title: Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA): Recent Advancements and Future Challenges

Abstract: Understanding the quality characteristics of facial images is of key importance for various face-related applications, ranging from biometric verification systems and problems in surveillance and security to applications in human-machine interaction and affective computing. In this talk, I will first talk about the general problem of Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) and discuss how it differs from the more perceptually driven Image Quality Assessment (IQA) task that is used for quality assessment of arbitrary natural images. I will then elaborate on the most interesting trends and solutions towards face image quality assessment and present two of our recent models for this task, i.e., (i) FaceQAN that predicts quality based on the analysis of adversarial noise, and (ii) DifFIQA that uses probabilistic denoising diffusion models to estimate face image quality. Finally, I will share some insights with respect to FIQA techniques and highlight some open issues and future research directions in this space.

Bio: Vitomir Štruc is a Full Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research interests include problems related to biometrics, computer vision, image processing, and machine learning. He (co-)authored more than 150 research papers for leading international peer reviewed journals and conferences in these and related areas. Vitomir is a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a Subject Editor for Elsevier’s Signal Processing and an Associate Editor for Pattern Recognition, and IET Biometrics. He serves regularly on the organizing committees of visible international conferences, including IJCB, FG, WACV and CVPR. He currently acts as a General Chair for IJCB 2023, a Program Chair for IEEE Face and Gesture 2024, a Tutorial Chair for CVPR 2024 and Program Co-Chair for WACV 2025. Dr. Struc is a Senior member of the IEEE, a member of IAPR, EURASIP, Slovenia’s ambassador for the European Association for Biometrics (EAB) and the former president and current executive committee member of the Slovenian Pattern Recognition Society, the Slovenian member of IAPR. Vitomir is also the current VP Technical Activities for the IEEE Biometrics Council, the secretary of the IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics (TC4) and a member of the Supervisory Board of the EAB.