Enhancing Quality of Pose-varied Face Restoration with Local Weak Feature Sensing and GAN Prior

Facial semantic guidance (facial landmarks, facial parsing maps, facial heatmaps, etc.) and facial generative adversarial networks (GAN) prior have been widely used in blind face restoration (BFR) in recent years. Although existing BFR methods have achieved good performance in ordinary cases, these solutions have limited resilience when applied to face images with serious degradation and pose-varied (look up, look down, laugh, etc.) in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a well-designed blind face restoration network with generative facial prior. The proposed network is mainly comprised of an asymmetric codec and StyleGAN2 prior network. In the asymmetric codec, we adopt a mixed multi-path residual block (MMRB) to gradually extract weak texture features of input images, which can improve the texture integrity and authenticity of our networks. Furthermore, the MMRB block can also be plug-and-play in any other network. Besides, a novel self-supervised training strategy is specially designed for face restoration tasks to fit the distribution closer to the target and maintain training stability. Extensive experiments over synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance to the prior art for face restoration and face super-resolution tasks and can tackle seriously degraded face images in diverse poses and expressions.