# Reference-Based Face Super-Resolution Using the Spatial Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11025/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution by Neural Texture Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00834/) (2019)
- [Understanding Deformable Alignment in Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07265/) (2020)
- [Robust Reference-based Super-Resolution via C2-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01863/) (2021)
- [Exemplar Guided Face Image Super-Resolution without Facial Landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07078/) (2019)
- [LMR: A Large-Scale Multi-Reference Dataset for Reference-based Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04970/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Quality Improvement in Videoconferencing using Keyframes-based GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04263/) (2023)
- [HIME: Efficient Headshot Image Super-Resolution with Multiple Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14863/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face super-resolution is the task of increasing the resolution of an image containing a face thereby adding finer detail. It is a ubiquitous task in many computer vision applications and quite often the user isn't even aware that it is being performed. However, doing it with high fidelity is challenging as it is an ill-posed problem. In this paper we present a reference-based solution for face super-resolution that uses higher resolution reference images to aid in the task. We show an alignment module based on the spatial transformer that is considerably more stable than the popular deformable convolutions. We also show an aggregation function that can take good quality information from the reference images when available or suppress the function when such information is unavailable. Finally, we show that our relatively smaller model can achieve state of the art results on multiple datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSRST.