A Lightweight Face Quality Assessment Framework to Improve Face Verification Performance in Realtime Screening Applications

Face image quality plays a critical role in determining the accuracy and reliability of face verification systems, particularly in real-time screening applications such as surveillance, identity verification, and access control. Low-quality face images, often caused by factors such as motion blur, poor lighting conditions, occlusions, and extreme pose variations, significantly degrade the performance of face recognition models, leading to higher false rejection and false acceptance rates. In this work, we propose a lightweight yet effective framework for automatic face quality assessment, which aims to pre-filter lowquality face images before they are passed to the verification pipeline. Our approach utilizes normalized facial landmarks in conjunction with a Random Forest Regression classifier to assess image quality, achieving an accuracy of 96.67 %. By integrating this quality assessment module into the face verification process, we observe a substantial improvement in performance, including a 99.7 % reduction in the false rejection rate and enhanced cosine similarity scores when paired with the ArcFace face verification model. To validate our approach, we have conducted experiments on a real-world dataset collected comprising over 600 subjects captured from CCTV footage in unconstrained environments within Dubai Police. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively mitigates the impact of poor-quality face images, outperforming existing face quality assessment techniques while maintaining computational efficiency.