Automatic Validation of ICAO Compliance Regarding Head Coverings: An Inclusive Approach Concerning Religious Circumstances

This paper contributes with a dataset and an algorithm that automatically verifies the compliance with the ICAO requirements related to the use of head coverings on facial images used on machine-readable travel documents. All the methods found in the literature ignore that some coverings might be accepted because of religious or cultural reasons, and basically only look for the presence of hats/caps. Our approach specifically includes the religious cases and distinguishes the head coverings that might be considered compliant. We built a dataset composed by facial images of 500 identities to accommodate these type of accessories. That data was used to fine-tune and train a classification model based on the YOLOv8 framework and we achieved state of the art results with an accuracy of 99.1 % and EER of 5.7%.