Feature out! Let Raw Image as Your Condition for Blind Face Restoration

Xinmin Qiu, Chen Gege, Bonan Li, Congying Han, Tiande Guo, Zicheng Zhang

Abstract:

Blind face restoration (BFR), which involves converting low-quality (LQ) images into high-quality (HQ) images, remains challenging due to complex and unknown degradations.
While previous diffusion-based methods utilize feature extractors from LQ images as guidance, using raw LQ images directly as the starting point for the reverse diffusion process offers a theoretically optimal solution.
In this work, we propose Pseudo-Hashing Image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (P-I2SB), a novel framework inspired by optimal mass transport problems, which enhances the restoration potential of Schrödinger Bridge (SB) by correcting data distributions and effectively learning the optimal transport path between any two data distributions.
Notably, we theoretically explore and identify that existing methods are limited by the optimality and reversibility of solutions in SB, leading to suboptimal performance.
Our approach involves preprocessing HQ images during training by hashing them into pseudo-samples according to a rule related to LQ images, ensuring structural similarity in distribution.
This guarantees optimal and reversible solutions in SB, enabling the inference process to learn effectively and allowing P-I2SB to achieve state-of-the-art results in BFR, with more natural textures and retained inference speed compared to previous methods.

Lay Summary: Face image restoration (BFR) is critical for applications such as surveillance enhancement and historical photo repair. However, severely degraded inputs (e.g., blur, noise, artifacts) pose significant challenges, as neither the degradations nor their restored outputs are uniquely determined. We propose Pseudo-Hashing Image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (P-I2SB)，, a novel framework inspired by optimal mass transport problems, which enhances the restoration potential of Schrödinger Bridge (SB) by correcting data distributions and effectively learning the optimal transport path between any two data distributions. Our approach advances restoration quality by explicitly modeling distributional relationships, offering a principled solution for ill-posed face restoration tasks.

Primary Area: Applications->Computer Vision

Keywords: Blind Face Restoration, Schrödinger Bridge

Submission Number: 4295