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Progressive Face Super-Resolution via Attention to Facial Landmark (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Aug 26, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It rebuilds tiny face photos 8 times larger in steps, each raising the resolution, and weights mistakes more heavily around eyes, nose, and mouth using a smaller detector of facial points. This kept faces looking real and beat earlier face upscalers, especially on naturalness.

Abstract

Face Super-Resolution (SR) is a subfield of the SR domain that specifically targets the reconstruction of face images. The main challenge of face SR is to restore essential facial features without distortion. We propose a novel face SR method that generates photo-realistic 8x super-resolved face images with fully retained facial details. To that end, we adopt a progressive training method, which allows stable training by splitting the network into successive steps, each producing output with a progressively higher resolution. We also propose a novel facial attention loss and apply it at each step to focus on restoring facial attributes in greater details by multiplying the pixel difference and heatmap values. Lastly, we propose a compressed version of the state-of-the-art face alignment network (FAN) for landmark heatmap extraction. With the proposed FAN, we can extract the heatmaps suitable for face SR and also reduce the overall training time. Experimental results verify that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measurements, especially in perceptual quality.

Deokyun Kim, Minseon Kim, Gihyun Kwon, Dae-Shik Kim
arXiv:1908.08239 · cs.CV · submitted Aug 22, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · BMVC 2019 Accepted

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Also discussed: Sep 2019 (9 points, 0 comments)