Dual-Path Deep Fusion Network for Face Image Hallucination.

Abstract

Along with the performance improvement of deep-learning-based face hallucination methods, various face priors (facial shape, facial landmark heatmaps, or parsing maps) have been used to describe holistic and partial facial features, making the cost of generating super-resolved face images expensive and laborious. To deal with this problem, we present a simple yet effective dual-path deep fusion network (DPDFN) for face image super-resolution (SR) without requiring additional face prior, which learns the global facial shape and local facial components through two individual branches. The proposed DPDFN is composed of three components: a global memory subnetwork (GMN), a local reinforcement subnetwork (LRN), and a fusion and reconstruction module (FRM). In particular, GMN characterize the holistic facial shape by employing recurrent dense residual learning to excavate wide-range context across spatial series. Meanwhile, LRN is committed to learning local facial components, which focuses on the patch-wise mapping relations between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) space on local regions rather than the entire image. Furthermore, by aggregating the global and local facial information from the preceding dual-path subnetworks, FRM can generate the corresponding high-quality face image. Experimental results of face hallucination on public face data sets and face recognition on real-world data sets (VGGface and SCFace) show the superiority both on visual effect and objective indicators over the previous state-of-the-art methods.