Robust face hallucination using quantization-adaptive dictionaries

Abstract

Existing face hallucination methods are optimized to super-resolve uncompressed images and are not able to handle the distortions caused by compression. This work presents a new dictionary construction method which jointly models both distortions caused by down-sampling and compression. The resulting dictionaries are then used to make three face super-resolution methods more robust to compression. Experimental results show that the proposed dictionary construction method generates dictionaries which are more representative of the low-quality face image being restored and makes the extended face hallucination methods more robust to compression. These experiments demonstrate that the proposed robust face hallucination methods can achieve Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) gains between 2-4.48dB and recognition improvement between 2.9-8.1% compared with the low-quality image and outperforming traditional super-resolution methods in most cases.