# GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 197 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [Image Processing Using Multi-Code GAN Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07116/) (2019)
- [FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10703/) (2017)
- [Transferring GANs: generating images from limited data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01677/) (2018)
- [MineGAN: effective knowledge transfer from GANs to target domains with few images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05270/) (2019)
- [Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00418/) (2020)
- [Learning Warped Guidance for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04829/) (2018)
- [Deep Semantic Face Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03345/) (2018)
- [Phase Retrieval Under a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04261/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 197)

- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14469/) (2023)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [StyleGAN-NADA: CLIP-Guided Domain Adaptation of Image Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00946/) (2021)
- [Pretraining is All You Need for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12952/) (2022)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00306/) (2023)
- [VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06803/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14758/) (2022)
- [Real-World Blind Super-Resolution via Feature Matching with Implicit High-Resolution Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13142/) (2022)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [DifFace: Blind Face Restoration with Diffused Error Contraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06512/) (2022)
- [StyleSync: High-Fidelity Generalized and Personalized Lip Sync in Style-based Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05445/) (2023)
- [DR2: Diffusion-based Robust Degradation Remover for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06885/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement via Structure Modeling and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05839/) (2023)
- [MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08062/) (2022)
- [OTAvatar: One-shot Talking Face Avatar with Controllable Tri-plane Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14662/) (2023)
- [CoSeR: Bridging Image and Language for Cognitive Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16512/) (2023)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00736/) (2024)
- [Motion-Guided Latent Diffusion for Temporally Consistent Real-world Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00853/) (2023)
- [Towards Vivid and Diverse Image Colorization with Generative Color Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08826/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13383/) (2024)
- [JoJoGAN: One Shot Face Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11641/) (2021)
- [PGDiff: Guiding Diffusion Models for Versatile Face Restoration via Partial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10810/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind face restoration (BFR) from severely degraded face images in the wild is a very challenging problem. Due to the high illness of the problem and the complex unknown degradation, directly training a deep neural network (DNN) usually cannot lead to acceptable results. Existing generative adversarial network (GAN) based methods can produce better results but tend to generate over-smoothed restorations. In this work, we propose a new method by first learning a GAN for high-quality face image generation and embedding it into a U-shaped DNN as a prior decoder, then fine-tuning the GAN prior embedded DNN with a set of synthesized low-quality face images. The GAN blocks are designed to ensure that the latent code and noise input to the GAN can be respectively generated from the deep and shallow features of the DNN, controlling the global face structure, local face details and background of the reconstructed image. The proposed GAN prior embedded network (GPEN) is easy-to-implement, and it can generate visually photo-realistic results. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed GPEN achieves significantly superior results to state-of-the-art BFR methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially for the restoration of severely degraded face images in the wild. The source code and models can be found at https://github.com/yangxy/GPEN.