Actions

eu-LISA has taken on maintenance responsibilities for the Open-Source Face Image Quality (OFIQ) tool, supporting the continued development of a critical biometric standardisation project.
Since August 2024, eu-LISA's Research and Innovation (R&I) team has been contributing to OFIQ’s maintenance, supporting the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), which leads the project.
The OFIQ development project was launched in 2020 within the ISO Sub-Committee 37 (ISO SC37 for the standardisation of biometric technology), and its current release serves as the reference implementation for the ISO/IEC 29794-5:2025 standard on face image quality (approved and published in May 2025). The tool addresses a fundamental challenge in large-scale biometric systems – ensuring facial images meet the quality level required for reliable recognition accuracy.
OFIQ Performance
The project has gained significant traction, with 300 participants registering for the first OFIQ user group meeting organised on 15 July 2025 by the European Association of Biometrics (EAB), BSI and eu-LISA.
During the event, that focused on the latest developments of the OFIQ project, eu-LISA research officer Javier Galbally presented preliminary results of the independent evaluation that eu-LISA carried out, with the support of DG JRC, on the shared Biometric Matching Service (sBMS), a key component of the Interoperability (IO) framework that the Agency is currently developing. In the evaluation, OFIQ consistently outperformed all other tested proprietary solutions in predicting the recognition performance on face image data of the sBMS. The full set of results and conclusions of the evaluation will soon be made available through a joint JRC and eu-LISA report.
Practical Applications
For eu-LISA, OFIQ's importance stems from the key role that it can play in the future in assessing the correct quality level of the face data stored in the different Core Business Systems (CBS) managed by the Agency, as well as ensuring compliance with EU regulations, including the EU Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2019/329 for the Entry/Exit System, which requires that the quality of facial images complies with the guidelines currently provided for frontal image types in the ISO/IEC 29794-5:2025 standard.
Being a standardised, open-source, vendor-agnostic tool, OFIQ can also contribute decisively to:
- the interoperability of the different CBS;
- increasing the transparency and explainability of the technology deployed by the Agency;
- helping to avoid vendor lock-in situations;
- increasing the cost-efficiency of the systems.
Development Roadmap
OFIQ version 2.0 is currently under development, set to be launched before the end of 2027. The upcoming version will focus on improved computational performance, enhanced accuracy for background uniformity and expression neutrality as well as reduced demographic bias.