Face Super-Resolution with Progressive Embedding of Multi-scale Face Priors

The face super-resolution (FSR) task is to reconstruct high-resolution face images from low-resolution inputs. Re-cent works have achieved success on this task by utilizing facial priors such as facial landmarks. Most existing methods pay more attention to global shape and structure information, but less to local texture information, which makes them cannot recover local details well. In this pa-per, we propose a novel recurrent convolutional network based framework for face super-resolution, which progres-sively introduces both global shape and local texture infor-mation. We take full advantage of the intermediate outputs of the recurrent network, and landmarks information and facial action units (AUs) information are extracted in the output of the first and second steps respectively, rather than low-resolution input. Moreover, we introduced AU clas-sification results as a novel quantitative metric for facial details restoration. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FSR methods in terms of image quality and facial details restoration.