Watch You Under Low-Resolution and Low-Illumination: Face Enhancement via Bi-Factor Degradation Decoupling

Xin Ding, Zheng Wang, Jing Fang, Zhenyu Shu, Ruimin Hu, Chia-Wen Lin

Abstract: Face enhancement aims to improve low-quality face images to a higher-quality level. However, in real-world nighttime scenes, complex degradation factors often affect these images, making it challenging to preserve important facial details. Existing image enhancement algorithms typically focus on independently conducting image super-resolution and brightness enhancement, assuming a fixed degradation level based on simulated training datasets. Nonetheless, real nighttime scenes involve complex degradation processes, where degradation factors dynamically and variably manifest. Therefore, achieving effective face enhancement in such scenarios is particularly daunting. This work analyzes and unveils the multiple factors of low resolution and low illumination during degradation. Based on this analysis, we propose a Bi-factor Degradation Decoupling network. Our method leverages a decoupling network to generate qualitative and quantitative features corresponding to each factor’s degradation degree in the low-quality environment. These features are then combined with robust facial feature constraints to recover the details of low-quality faces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both enhancement and face super-resolution.