Identity-Preserving Face Hallucination via Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose an identity-preserving face hallucination (IPFH) method via deep reinforcement learning. Most existing methods ultra-resolve facial visual information in guidance of appearance similarity which rarely attend to recovering the semantic property, undermining further face analysis (e.g., recognition). We present a visual-semantic hallucinator relying on deep reinforcement learning to adaptively repair local details for the restoration of both identity and appearance characteristics. Specifically, we first capture the facial global topology structure to roughly recover the visual information with the pixel-wise similarity constraint. To super-resolve more photo-realistic faces, we explore the contextual interdependency to reconstruct facial local textural details (e.g., over-smoothed edges) with the constraints of visual and identity similarity. In terms of the visual similarity constraint, we develop the dual domain network with bidirectional consistency on both HR domain and LR domain to improve the appearance quality. Moreover, we introduce the identity constraint to encourage hallucinated faces to satisfy the identity property. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate our method achieves promising performance on the recovery of visual and semantic information.