A novel correspondence-based face-hallucination method

This paper addresses the problem of estimating high-resolution (HR) facial images from a single low-resolution (LR) input. We assume that the input LR and estimated HR images are under the same view-point and illumination condition, i.e. the setting of image super-resolution. At the core of our techniques is that the facial images can be decomposed as a texture vector, characterized in terms of the appearance, and a shape vector, characterized in terms of the geometry variations. This enables a two-stage successive estimation framework that is geometry aware and obviates the needs in sophisticated optimizations. In particular, the proposed technique first solves for appearance of the HR faces form the correspondence derived between an interpolated LR face and its corresponding HR face. Given the texture of the HR faces, we incorporate optical flow to solve the local structure at sub-pixel level for the HR faces; here, we use additional geometry inspired priors to further regularize the solution. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of retaining the facial-feature shape and the estimation of novel features.