3D Priors-Guided Diffusion for Blind Face Restoration

Blind face restoration endeavors to restore a clear face image from a degraded counterpart. Recent approaches employing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as priors have demonstrated remarkable success in this field. However, these methods encounter challenges in achieving a balance between realism and fidelity, particularly in complex degradation scenarios. To inherit the exceptional realism generative ability of the diffusion model and also constrained by the identity-aware fidelity, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework by embedding the 3D facial priors as structure and identity constraints into a denoising diffusion process. Specifically, in order to obtain more accurate 3D prior representations, the 3D facial image is reconstructed by a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) using an initial restored face image that has been processed by a pretrained restoration network. A customized multi-level feature extraction method is employed to exploit both structural and identity information of 3D facial images, which are then mapped into the noise estimation process. In order to enhance the fusion of identity information into the noise estimation, we propose a Time-Aware Fusion Block (TAFB). This module offers a more efficient and adaptive fusion of weights for denoising, considering the dynamic nature of the denoising process in the diffusion model, which involves initial structure refinement followed by texture detail enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on synthetic and real-world datasets for blind face restoration.