# ENTED: Enhanced Neural Texture Extraction and Distribution for Reference-based Blind Face Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06978 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06978/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Image Super-Resolution by Neural Texture Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00834/) (2019)
- [VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06803/) (2022)
- [Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00418/) (2020)
- [Progressive Semantic-Aware Style Transformation for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08709/) (2020)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [Learning Warped Guidance for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04829/) (2018)
- [RestoreFormer: High-Quality Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06374/) (2022)
- [Deep Semantic Face Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03345/) (2018)
- [MASA-SR: Matching Acceleration and Spatial Adaptation for Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02299/) (2021)
- [NAFSSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution Using NAFNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08714/) (2022)
- [Progressive Face Super-Resolution via Attention to Facial Landmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08239/) (2019)
- [HiFaceGAN: Face Renovation via Collaborative Suppression and Replenishment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05005/) (2020)
- [Robust Reference-based Super-Resolution via C2-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01863/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Robust ID-Specific Face Restoration via Alignment Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10943/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present ENTED, a new framework for blind face restoration that aims to restore high-quality and realistic portrait images. Our method involves repairing a single degraded input image using a high-quality reference image. We utilize a texture extraction and distribution framework to transfer high-quality texture features between the degraded input and reference image. However, the StyleGAN-like architecture in our framework requires high-quality latent codes to generate realistic images. The latent code extracted from the degraded input image often contains corrupted features, making it difficult to align the semantic information from the input with the high-quality textures from the reference. To overcome this challenge, we employ two special techniques. The first technique, inspired by vector quantization, replaces corrupted semantic features with high-quality code words. The second technique generates style codes that carry photorealistic texture information from a more informative latent space developed using the high-quality features in the reference image's manifold. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method produces results with more realistic contextual details and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. A thorough ablation study confirms the effectiveness of each proposed module.