This paper studies the problem of blind face restoration from an unconstrained blurry, noisy, low-resolution, or compressed image (i.e., degraded observation). For better recovery of fine facial details, we modify the problem setting by taking both the degraded observation and a high-quality guided image of the same identity as input to our guided face restoration network (GFRNet). However, the degraded observation and guided image generally are different in pose, illumination and expression, thereby making plain CNNs (e.g., U-Net) fail to recover fine and identity-aware facial details. To tackle this issue, our GFRNet model includes both a warping subnetwork (WarpNet) and a reconstruction subnetwork (RecNet). The WarpNet is introduced to predict flow field for warping the guided image to correct pose and expression (i.e., warped guidance), while the RecNet takes the degraded observation and warped guidance as input to produce the restoration result. Due to that the ground-truth flow field is unavailable, landmark loss together with total variation regularization are incorporated to guide the learning of WarpNet. Furthermore, to make the model applicable to blind restoration, our GFRNet is trained on the synthetic data with versatile settings on blur kernel, noise level, downsampling scale factor, and JPEG quality factor. Experiments show that our GFRNet not only performs favorably against the state-of-the-art image and face restoration methods, but also generates visually photo-realistic results on real degraded facial images.
Recently, spatial transformer networks (STNs) are suggested to learn a spatial mapping for warping an image @cite_43 , and appearance flow networks (AFNs) are presented to predict a dense flow field to move pixels @cite_12 @cite_18 . Deep dense flow networks have been applied to view synthesis @cite_12 @cite_23 , gaze manipulation @cite_18 , expression editing @cite_55 , and video frame synthesis @cite_56 . In these approaches, the target image is required to have the similar lighting condition with the input image to be warped, and the dense flow networks can thus be trained via reconstruction learning. However, in our guided face restoration task, the guided image and the target image usually are of different lighting conditions, making it less effective to train the flow network via reconstruction learning. Moreover, the ground-truth dense flow field is not available, further increasing the difficulty to train WarpNet. To tackle this issue, we use the face alignment method @cite_40 to extract the face landmarks of guided and target images. Then, the landmark loss and TV regularization are incorporated to facilitate the WarpNet training.
@cite_18 @cite_55 @cite_56 @cite_43 @cite_40 @cite_23 @cite_12
2508756538 2558578635 2951005624 1795776638 2598591334
This paper studies the problem of blind face restoration from an unconstrained blurry, noisy, low-resolution, or compressed image (i.e., degraded observation). For better recovery of fine facial details, we modify the problem setting by taking both the degraded observation and a high-quality guided image of the same identity as input to our guided face restoration network (GFRNet). However, the degraded observation and guided image generally are different in pose, illumination and expression, thereby making plain CNNs (e.g., U-Net) fail to recover fine and identity-aware facial details. To tackle this issue, our GFRNet model includes both a warping subnetwork (WarpNet) and a reconstruction subnetwork (RecNet). The WarpNet is introduced to predict flow field for warping the guided image to correct pose and expression (i.e., warped guidance), while the RecNet takes the degraded observation and warped guidance as input to produce the restoration result. Due to that the ground-truth flow field is unavailable, landmark loss together with total variation regularization are incorporated to guide the learning of WarpNet. Furthermore, to make the model applicable to blind restoration, our GFRNet is trained on the synthetic data with versatile settings on blur kernel, noise level, downsampling scale factor, and JPEG quality factor. Experiments show that our GFRNet not only performs favorably against the state-of-the-art image and face restoration methods, but also generates visually photo-realistic results on real degraded facial images. We present a minimalistic but effective neural network that computes dense facial correspondences in highly unconstrained RGB images. Our network learns a per-pixel flow and a matchability mask between 2D input photographs of a person and the projection of a textured 3D face model. To train such a network, we generate a massive dataset of synthetic faces with dense labels using renderings of a morphable face model with variations in pose, expressions, lighting, and occlusions. We found that a training refinement using real photographs is required to drastically improve the ability to handle real images. When combined with a facial detection and 3D face fitting step, we show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art face alignment methods in terms of accuracy and speed. By directly estimating dense correspondences, we do not rely on the full visibility of sparse facial landmarks and are not limited to the model space of regression-based approaches. We also assess our method on video frames and demonstrate successful per-frame processing under extreme pose variations, occlusions, and lighting conditions. Compared to existing 3D facial tracking techniques, our fitting does not rely on previous frames or frontal facial initialization and is robust to imperfect face detections. While image alignment has been studied in different areas of computer vision for decades, aligning images depicting different scenes remains a challenging problem. Analogous to optical flow, where an image is aligned to its temporally adjacent frame, we propose SIFT flow, a method to align an image to its nearest neighbors in a large image corpus containing a variety of scenes. The SIFT flow algorithm consists of matching densely sampled, pixelwise SIFT features between two images while preserving spatial discontinuities. The SIFT features allow robust matching across different scene object appearances, whereas the discontinuity-preserving spatial model allows matching of objects located at different parts of the scene. Experiments show that the proposed approach robustly aligns complex scene pairs containing significant spatial differences. Based on SIFT flow, we propose an alignment-based large database framework for image analysis and synthesis, where image information is transferred from the nearest neighbors to a query image according to the dense scene correspondence. This framework is demonstrated through concrete applications such as motion field prediction from a single image, motion synthesis via object transfer, satellite image registration, and face recognition. We present an approach that takes a single video of a persons face and reconstructs a high detail 3D shape for each video frame. We target videos taken under uncontrolled and uncalibrated imaging conditions, such as youtube videos of celebrities. In the heart of this work is a new dense 3D flow estimation method coupled with shape from shading. Unlike related works we do not assume availability of a blend shape model, nor require the person to participate in a training capturing process. Instead we leverage the large amounts of photos that are available per individual in personal or internet photo collections. We show results for a variety of video sequences that include various lighting conditions, head poses, and facial expressions. Video frame interpolation algorithms typically estimate optical flow or its variations and then use it to guide the synthesis of an intermediate frame between two consecutive original frames. To handle challenges like occlusion, bidirectional flow between the two input frames is often estimated and used to warp and blend the input frames. However, how to effectively blend the two warped frames still remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a context-aware synthesis approach that warps not only the input frames but also their pixel-wise contextual information and uses them to interpolate a high-quality intermediate frame. Specifically, we first use a pre-trained neural network to extract per-pixel contextual information for input frames. We then employ a state-of-the-art optical flow algorithm to estimate bidirectional flow between them and pre-warp both input frames and their context maps. Finally, unlike common approaches that blend the pre-warped frames, our method feeds them and their context maps to a video frame synthesis neural network to produce the interpolated frame in a context-aware fashion. Our neural network is fully convolutional and is trained end to end. Our experiments show that our method can handle challenging scenarios such as occlusion and large motion and outperforms representative state-of-the-art approaches. Light field cameras have many advantages over traditional cameras, as they allow the user to change various camera settings after capture. However, capturing light fields requires a huge bandwidth to record the data: a modern light field camera can only take three images per second. This prevents current consumer light field cameras from capturing light field videos. Temporal interpolation at such extreme scale (10x, from 3 fps to 30 fps) is infeasible as too much information will be entirely missing between adjacent frames. Instead, we develop a hybrid imaging system, adding another standard video camera to capture the temporal information. Given a 3 fps light field sequence and a standard 30 fps 2D video, our system can then generate a full light field video at 30 fps. We adopt a learning-based approach, which can be decomposed into two steps: spatio-temporal flow estimation and appearance estimation. The flow estimation propagates the angular information from the light field sequence to the 2D video, so we can warp input images to the target view. The appearance estimation then combines these warped images to output the final pixels. The whole process is trained end-to-end using convolutional neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms current video interpolation methods, enabling consumer light field videography, and making applications such as refocusing and parallax view generation achievable on videos for the first time. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results.