# Deep Face Restoration: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 91 of its 181 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 91)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15736/) (2023)
- [WaveFace: Authentic Face Restoration with Efficient Frequency Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12760/) (2024)
- [DSL-FIQA: Assessing Facial Image Quality via Dual-Set Degradation Learning and Landmark-Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09622/) (2024)
- [MMNet: Multi-Collaboration and Multi-Supervision Network for Sequential Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02733/) (2023)
- [Generative Portrait Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05525/) (2024)
- [Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21042/) (2024)
- [Self-Adaptive Reality-Guided Diffusion for Artifact-Free Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16643/) (2024)
- [SimpSON: Simplifying Photo Cleanup with Single-Click Distracting Object Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17624/) (2023)
- [Blind Face Restoration for Under-Display Camera via Dictionary Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10196/) (2023)
- [FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15445/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Ultra-High-Definition Image Reflection Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00265/) (2023)
- [Analysis and Benchmarking of Extending Blind Face Image Restoration to Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11828/) (2024)
- [OPHAvatars: One-shot Photo-realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09153/) (2023)
- [Boosting Cross-Quality Face Verification using Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07967/) (2023)
- [CorrAdaptor: Adaptive Local Context Learning for Correspondence Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08134/) (2024)
- [AS-FIBA: Adaptive Selective Frequency-Injection for Backdoor Attack on Deep Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06430/) (2024)
- [Latent Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow for Higher-Fidelity Perceptual Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00447/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face Restoration (FR) aims to restore High-Quality (HQ) faces from Low-Quality (LQ) input images, which is a domain-specific image restoration problem in the low-level computer vision area. The early face restoration methods mainly use statistical priors and degradation models, which are difficult to meet the requirements of real-world applications in practice. In recent years, face restoration has witnessed great progress after stepping into the deep learning era. However, there are few works to systematically study the deep learning based face restoration methods. Thus, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances in deep learning techniques for face restoration. Specifically, we first summarize different problem formulations and analyze the characteristics of face images. Second, we discuss the challenges of face restoration. With regard to these challenges, we present a comprehensive review of recent FR methods, including prior-based methods and deep-learning methods. Then, we explore developed techniques in the task of FR covering network architectures, loss functions, and benchmark datasets. We also conduct a systematic benchmark evaluation on representative methods. Finally, we discuss the future directions including network designs, metrics, benchmark datasets, applications, etc. We also provide an open source repository for all the discussed methods, which is available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/Awesome-Face-Restoration.