Exploring Correlations in Degraded Spatial Identity Features for Blind Face Restoration

Blind face restoration aims to recover high-quality face images from low-quality ones with complex and unknown degradation. Existing approaches have achieved promising performance by leveraging pre-trained dictionaries or generative priors. However, these methods may fail to exploit the full potential of degraded inputs and facial identity features due to complex degradation. To address this issue, we propose a novel method that explores the correlation of degraded spatial identity features by learning a general representation using memory network. Specifically, our approach enhances degraded features with more identity by leveraging similar facial features retrieved from memory network. We also propose a fusion approach that fuses memorized spatial features with GAN prior features via affine transformation and blending fusion to improve fidelity and realism. Additionally, the memory network is updated online in an unsupervised manner along with other modules, which obviates the requirement for pre-training. Experimental results on synthetic and popular real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves at least comparable and often better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches.