EU-LISA takes on maintenance responsibilities for OFIQ

EU-LISA, the agency in charge of managing Europe’s border control IT systems, is taking on maintenance responsibilities for the Open-Source Face Image Quality (OFIQ) biometric standardization project.

OFIQ was launched in 2020 as a framework for assessing the quality of facial images and ensuring they meet the level required for reliable facial recognition. The project is important for EU-LISA because of its role in correcting the quality of facial data stored in its systems, including Europe’s upcoming Entry-Exit System (EES).

The border registration scheme is expected to launch in October and will collect facial images and fingerprints from third-country travelers entering the EU.

Aside from the EES, the agency is also in charge of the European Asylum Dactyloscopy database (Eurodac), the Schengen Information System (SIS), the Visa Information System (VIS), the European Travel Information Authorization System (ETIAS) and more.

“Being a standardised, open-source, vendor-agnostic tool, OFIQ can also contribute decisively to: the interoperability of the different [Core Business Systems]; 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,” says EU-LISA.

OFIQ is led by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and currently has 300 participants.

The project is operating within the ISO Sub-Committee 37, a technical committee within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) dedicated to standardizing biometric technology. Its current release serves as the reference implementation for the ISO/IEC 29794-5:2025 standard on face image quality, approved in May.

According to EU rules, the EES will require that the quality of facial images complies with guidelines provided by the standard.

Last month, EU-LISA research officer Javier Galbally presented preliminary results of an evaluation comparing predictions about the accuracy of the agency’s shared biometric matching system made by OFIQ to those from the same contractor that provided the system. OFIQ significantly outperformed the biometric engine vendor’s own quality assessment.

The findings were presented at an OFIQ User Group Meeting hosted by the European Association of Biometrics. The full results are set to be released in a report authored by EU-LISA and the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

OFIQ version 2.0 is currently under development and is 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,” according to EU-Lisa.

Article Topics

biometric data quality  |  biometrics  |  eu-LISA  |  facial recognition  |  German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)  |  Open Source Face Image Quality (OFIQ)  |  standards