C-Face: Using Compare Face on Face Hallucination for Low-Resolution Face Recognition

Abstract

Face hallucination is a task of generating high-resolution (HR) face images from low-resolution (LR) inputs, which is a subfield of the general image super-resolution. However, most of the previous methods only consider the visual effect, ignoring how to maintain the identity of the face. In this work, we propose a novel face hallucination model, called C-Face network, which can generate HR images with high visual quality while preserving the identity information. A face recognition network is used to extract the identity features in the training process. In order to make the reconstructed face images keep the identity information to a great extent, a novel metric, i.e., C-Face loss, is proposed. We also propose a new training algorithm to deal with the convergence problem. Moreover, since our work mainly focuses on the recognition accuracy of the output, we integrate face recognition into the face hallucination process which ensures that the model can be used in real scenarios. Extensive experiments on two large scale face datasets demonstrate that our C-Face network has the best performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.