Implementation of selected ISO/IEC 29794-5 measures and proposing alternatives

Face recognition is currently one of the most popular forms of biometric verification. As the effectiveness and security of this solution increase, so does its use in specialized fields. Considering that the verification process involves thousands of people, often under varying lighting conditions and with equipment of different parameters, biometric samples are of mixed quality. Therefore, there is a need to define the conditions under which a biometric sample is objectively good for a face recognition system. To address this, the international standard ISO/IEC 29794-5:2025 was developed, with defined quality measures, along with a description of suggested implementation where the majority of substantive work has already been completed. The aim of this work is to provide non-proprietary implementation of the ISO/IEC 29794-5:2023 standard for face image quality assessment and to compare its performance against OFIQ reference implementation. More broadly, this study examines the common challenge that biometric standards sometimes propose ideas that may not be top-effective in real-life operational scenarios. This paper includes the implementation of two systems for assessing face image quality based on selected standard’s measures. The first system follows the implementation suggested directly by the standard, while the second utilizes the latest scientific and commercial solutions. Ultimately, these systems are compared using a database of photographs differentiated by demographics and quality.