用预训练模型的注意力图评估人脸图像质量,无需训练即可解释好坏原因。
ATTN-FIQA: Interpretable Attention-based Face Image Quality Assessment with Vision Transformers

- 直接提取预训练Vision Transformer的注意力分数作为质量指标
- 单次前向传播完成评估,无需反向传播或额外训练
- 能定位关键面部区域,适合需要可解释性的质检场景
人脸图像质量评估(FIQA)旨在衡量人脸样本的识别可用性,对可靠的人脸识别系统至关重要。现有方法通常需要计算开销大的过程,如多次前向传播、反向传播或额外训练,且近期才关注基于视觉变换器(Vision Transformers)的方法。研究表明,这类架构天然具备显著性学习能力,注意力模式能自然编码空间重要性。本文提出ATTN-FIQA,一种无需训练的新方法,探索预训练视觉变换器模型中预软化注意力分数是否可作为质量指标。我们假设:高质量图像因具有判别性特征,会引发强查询-键对齐,形成集中且高幅度的注意力模式;而劣质图像则产生分散、低幅度的模式。ATTN-FIQA从最终变换器块提取预软化注意力矩阵,跨所有图像块聚合多头注意力信息,并通过简单平均得到图像级质量得分,仅需一次前向传播,无需模型修改、反向传播或额外训练。在八个基准数据集和四个人脸识别模型上的综合评估表明,基于注意力的质量得分与图像质量高度相关,并提供空间可解释性,揭示哪些面部区域对质量判断贡献最大。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) aims to assess the recognition utility of face samples and is essential for reliable face recognition (FR) systems. Existing approaches require computationally expensive procedures such as multiple forward passes, backpropagation, or additional training, and only recent work has focused on the use of Vision Transformers. Recent studies highlighted that these architectures inherently function as saliency learners with attention patterns naturally encoding spatial importance. This work proposes ATTN-FIQA, a novel training-free approach that investigates whether pre-softmax attention scores from pre-trained Vision Transformer-based face recognition models can serve as quality indicators. We hypothesize that attention magnitudes intrinsically encode quality: high-quality images with discriminative facial features enable strong query-key alignments producing focused, high-magnitude attention patterns, while degraded images generate diffuse, low-magnitude patterns. ATTN-FIQA extracts pre-softmax attention matrices from the final transformer block, aggregate multi-head attention information across all patches, and compute image-level quality scores through simple averaging, requiring only a single forward pass through pre-trained models without architectural modifications, backpropagation, or additional training. Through comprehensive evaluation across eight benchmark datasets and four FR models, this work demonstrates that attention-based quality scores effectively correlate with face image quality and provide spatial interpretability, revealing which facial regions contribute most to quality determination.
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