Enhanced blind face restoration with multi-exemplar images and adaptive spatial feature fusion

In many real-world face restoration applications, e.g., smartphone photo albums and old films, multiple high-quality (HQ) images of the same person usually are available for a given degraded low-quality (LQ) observation. However, most existing guided face restoration methods are based on single HQ exemplar image, and are limited in properly exploiting guidance for improving the generalization ability to unknown degradation process. To address these issues, this paper suggests to enhance blind face restoration performance by utilizing multi-exemplar images and adaptive fusion of features from guidance and degraded images. First, given a degraded observation, we select the optimal guidance based on the weighted affine distance on landmark sets, where the landmark weights are learned to make the guidance image optimized to HQ image reconstruction. Second, moving least-square and adaptive instance normalization are leveraged for spatial alignment and illumination translation of guidance image in the feature space. Finally, for better feature fusion, multiple adaptive spatial feature fusion (ASFF) layers are introduced to incorporate guidance features in an adaptive and progressive manner, resulting in our ASFFNet. Experiments show that our ASFFNet performs favorably in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and is effective in generating photo-realistic results on real-world LQ images. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/ASFFNet.