Impact of Head Pose Angles on Face Image Quality and Recognition Performance

The head pose is a critical influencing factor for the utility of a face image in face recognition systems. For reference face images such as passport photographs, the head pose is required to be frontal. For probe images, the question arises as to how much deviation from a frontal head pose would be tolerable without compromising recognition performance. Relaxed head pose requirements can speed up the process of capturing single-use probe images, e.g., at border checkpoints, as adopting a precise frontal pose can take several attempts. Our work validates the threshold values based on the head pose angles computed using the Open Source Face Image Quality (OFIQ) software.