Unlocking the Potential of Diffusion Priors in Blind Face Restoration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Miao, Yunqi, Qu, Zhiyu, Gao, Mingqi, Chen, Changrui, Song, Jifei, Han, Jungong, Deng, Jiankang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Miao, Yunqi
Qu, Zhiyu
Gao, Mingqi
Chen, Changrui
Song, Jifei
Han, Jungong
Deng, Jiankang
author_facet Miao, Yunqi
Qu, Zhiyu
Gao, Mingqi
Chen, Changrui
Song, Jifei
Han, Jungong
Deng, Jiankang
contents Although diffusion prior is rising as a powerful solution for blind face restoration (BFR), the inherent gap between the vanilla diffusion model and BFR settings hinders its seamless adaptation. The gap mainly stems from the discrepancy between 1) high-quality (HQ) and low-quality (LQ) images and 2) synthesized and real-world images. The vanilla diffusion model is trained on images with no or less degradations, whereas BFR handles moderately to severely degraded images. Additionally, LQ images used for training are synthesized by a naive degradation model with limited degradation patterns, which fails to simulate complex and unknown degradations in real-world scenarios. In this work, we use a unified network FLIPNET that switches between two modes to resolve specific gaps. In Restoration mode, the model gradually integrates BFR-oriented features and face embeddings from LQ images to achieve authentic and faithful face restoration. In Degradation mode, the model synthesizes real-world like degraded images based on the knowledge learned from real-world degradation datasets. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets show that our model 1) outperforms previous diffusion prior based BFR methods in terms of authenticity and fidelity, and 2) outperforms the naive degradation model in modeling the real-world degradations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08556
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking the Potential of Diffusion Priors in Blind Face Restoration
Miao, Yunqi
Qu, Zhiyu
Gao, Mingqi
Chen, Changrui
Song, Jifei
Han, Jungong
Deng, Jiankang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Although diffusion prior is rising as a powerful solution for blind face restoration (BFR), the inherent gap between the vanilla diffusion model and BFR settings hinders its seamless adaptation. The gap mainly stems from the discrepancy between 1) high-quality (HQ) and low-quality (LQ) images and 2) synthesized and real-world images. The vanilla diffusion model is trained on images with no or less degradations, whereas BFR handles moderately to severely degraded images. Additionally, LQ images used for training are synthesized by a naive degradation model with limited degradation patterns, which fails to simulate complex and unknown degradations in real-world scenarios. In this work, we use a unified network FLIPNET that switches between two modes to resolve specific gaps. In Restoration mode, the model gradually integrates BFR-oriented features and face embeddings from LQ images to achieve authentic and faithful face restoration. In Degradation mode, the model synthesizes real-world like degraded images based on the knowledge learned from real-world degradation datasets. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets show that our model 1) outperforms previous diffusion prior based BFR methods in terms of authenticity and fidelity, and 2) outperforms the naive degradation model in modeling the real-world degradations.
title Unlocking the Potential of Diffusion Priors in Blind Face Restoration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08556