CLIB-FIQA: Face Image Quality Assessment with Confidence Calibration

Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) is pivotal for guaranteeing the accuracy of face recognition in unconstrained environments. Recent progress in deep quality-fitting-based methods which train models to align with quality anchors, has shown promise in FIQA. However, these methods heavily depend on a recognition model to yield quality anchors and indiscriminately treat the confidence of inaccurate anchors as equivalent to that of accurate ones during the FIQA model training, leading to a fitting bottleneck issue. This paper seeks a solution by putting forward the Confidence-Calibrated Face Image Quality Assessment (CLIB-FIQA) approach, underpinned by the synergistic interplay between the quality anchors and objective quality factors such as blur, pose, expression, occlusion, and illumination. Specifically, we devise a joint learning framework built upon the vision-language alignment model, which leverages the joint distribution with multiple quality factors to facilitate the quality fitting of the FIQA model. Furthermore, to alleviate the issue of the model placing excessive trust in inaccurate quality anchors, we propose a confidence calibration method to correct the quality distribution by exploiting to the fullest extent of these objective quality factors characterized as the merged-factor distribution during training. Experimental results on eight datasets reveal the superior performance of the proposed method. The source code will be made publicly available.