Blind face restoration usually relies on facial priors, such as facial geometry prior or reference prior, to restore realistic and faithful details. However, very low-quality inputs cannot offer accurate geometric prior while high-quality references are inaccessible, limiting the applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose GFP-GAN that leverages rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a pretrained face GAN for blind face restoration. This Generative Facial Prior (GFP) is incorporated into the face restoration process via spatial feature transform layers, which allow our method to achieve a good balance of realness and fidelity.
2021: Xintao Wang, Yu Li, Honglun Zhang, Ying Shan
Ranked #1 on Blind Face Restoration on CelebA-Test
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.04061v2.pdf