High-quality face image generated with conditional boundary equilibrium generative adversarial networks

Abstract

We propose a novel single face image super-resolution method, which is named Face Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (FCGAN), based on boundary equilibrium generative adversarial networks. Without taking any prior facial information, our approach combines the pixel-wise L1 loss and GAN loss to optimize our super-resolution model and to generate a high-quality face image from a low-resolution one robustly (with upscaling factor 4 × ). Additionally, Compared with existing peer researches, both training and testing phases of FCGAN are end-to-end pipeline without pre/post-processing. To enhance the convergence speed and strengthen feature propagation, the Generator and Discriminator networks are designed with a skip-connection architecture, and both using an auto-encoder structure. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art models based on both visual quality and quantitative criterions. We believe this high-quality face image generated method can impact many applications in face identification and intelligent monitor.