Rakhil Immidisetti

Sizhuo Ma, Wei-Ting Chen, Qiang Gao et al.

Face images play a crucial role in numerous applications; however, real-world conditions frequently introduce degradations such as noise, blur, and compression artifacts, affecting overall image quality and hindering subsequent tasks. To address this challenge, we organized the VQualA 2025 Challenge on Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) as part of the ICCV 2025 Workshops. Participants created lightweight and efficient models (limited to 0.5 GFLOPs and 5 million parameters) for the prediction of Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) on face images with arbitrary resolutions and realistic degradations. Submissions underwent comprehensive evaluations through correlation metrics on a dataset of in-the-wild face images. This challenge attracted 127 participants, with 1519 final submissions. This report summarizes the methodologies and findings for advancing the development of practical FIQA approaches.

Rakhil Immidisetti, Shuowen Hu, Vishal M. Patel

Existing thermal-to-visible face verification approaches expect the thermal and visible face images to be of similar resolution. This is unlikely in real-world long-range surveillance systems, since humans are distant from the cameras. To address this issue, we introduce the task of thermal-to-visible face verification from low-resolution thermal images. Furthermore, we propose Axial-Generative Adversarial Network (Axial-GAN) to synthesize high-resolution visible images for matching. In the proposed approach we augment the GAN framework with axial-attention layers which leverage the recent advances in transformers for modelling long-range dependencies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by evaluating on two different thermal-visible face datasets. When compared to related state-of-the-art works, our results show significant improvements in both image quality and face verification performance, and are also much more efficient.