# Towards Real-world Video Face Restoration: A New Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19500 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19500/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (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)
- [ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04579/) (2015)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10703/) (2017)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [GLEAN: Generative Latent Bank for Large-Factor Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00739/) (2020)
- [SER-FIQ: Unsupervised Estimation of Face Image Quality Based on Stochastic Embedding Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09373/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [DiffIR2VR-Zero: Zero-Shot Video Restoration with Diffusion-based Image Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01519/) (2024)
- [HiFiVFS: High Fidelity Video Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18293/) (2024)
- [Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21042/) (2024)
- [GaussianSwap: Animatable Video Face Swapping with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05511/) (2026)
- [DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14560/) (2026)
- [RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16401/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind face restoration (BFR) on images has significantly progressed over the last several years, while real-world video face restoration (VFR), which is more challenging for more complex face motions such as moving gaze directions and facial orientations involved, remains unsolved. Typical BFR methods are evaluated on privately synthesized datasets or self-collected real-world low-quality face images, which are limited in their coverage of real-world video frames. In this work, we introduced new real-world datasets named FOS with a taxonomy of "Full, Occluded, and Side" faces from mainly video frames to study the applicability of current methods on videos. Compared with existing test datasets, FOS datasets cover more diverse degradations and involve face samples from more complex scenarios, which helps to revisit current face restoration approaches more comprehensively. Given the established datasets, we benchmarked both the state-of-the-art BFR methods and the video super resolution (VSR) methods to comprehensively study current approaches, identifying their potential and limitations in VFR tasks. In addition, we studied the effectiveness of the commonly used image quality assessment (IQA) metrics and face IQA (FIQA) metrics by leveraging a subjective user study. With extensive experimental results and detailed analysis provided, we gained insights from the successes and failures of both current BFR and VSR methods. These results also pose challenges to current face restoration approaches, which we hope stimulate future advances in VFR research.