Drivers licenses have watermarks so will impact qualty.  Plus its a small image and thus a lot of the resolution has been washed out of it when reducing size.   So photo id images are in general not ideal, but will work with facial recognition.  


Avoid glare in the picture and use a good quality camera/mobile phone to take the picture.  Always if you can, get a photo of the actual face, assuming you have a camera that was close enough and conditions such as face size, center pose and lighting are good.


Below is a photo of a drivers license from a good quality mobile phone camera compared with photo of the actual face from the same camera.  


Photo from Drivers LicensePhoto direct


Both mages  are exported to jpg full quality image.  The view is resized to fit in the table but if you download the image you can see the full resolution.


The drivers photo has less detail plus lines across the face which is will have a small impact on recognition.  The direct face photo has much more detail in the face and no watermarks or lines.  The direct photo is a much better representation to perform recognition on.

Performance of the two:
  • Both will match 100% when getting moderate to good quality image off the camera.
  • Both will match a profile face at about same distance equally well
  • Direct face results in a match when low quality front looking towards camera  (far from camera and in motion)
Please note, these results are  based on some casual tests and not the results of rigorous testing.