Previous research on face restoration often focused on repairing a specific type of low-quality facial images such as low-resolution (LR) or occluded facial images. However, in the real world, both the above-mentioned forms of image degradation often coexist. Therefore, it is important to design a model that can repair LR occluded images simultaneously. This paper proposes a multi-scale feature graph generative adversarial network (MFG-GAN) to implement the face restoration of images in which both degradation modes coexist, and also to repair images with a single type of degradation. Based on the GAN, the MFG-GAN integrates the graph convolution and feature pyramid network to restore occluded low-resolution face images to non-occluded high-resolution face images. The MFG-GAN uses a set of customized losses to ensure that high-quality images are generated. In addition, we designed the network in an end-to-end format. Experimental results on the public-domain CelebA and Helen databases show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in performing face super-resolution (up to 4x or 8x) and face completion simultaneously. Cross-database testing also revealed that the proposed approach has good generalizability.
Facial expression analysis in the wild is challenging when the facial image is with low resolution or partial occlusion. Considering the correlations among different facial local regions under different facial expressions, this paper proposes a novel facial expression restoration method based on generative adversarial network by integrating an improved graph convolutional network (IGCN) and region relation modeling block (RRMB). Unlike conventional graph convolutional networks taking vectors as input features, IGCN can use tensors of face patches as inputs. It is better to retain the structure information of face patches. The proposed RRMB is designed to address facial generative tasks including inpainting and super-resolution with facial action units detection, which aims to restore facial expression as the ground-truth. Extensive experiments conducted on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method through quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Facial expression synthesis or editing has recently received increasing attention in the field of affective computing and facial expression modeling. However, most existing facial expression synthesis works are limited in paired training data, low resolution, identity information damaging, and so on. To address those limitations, this paper introduces a novel Action Unit (AU) level facial expression synthesis method called Local Attentive Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (LAC-GAN) based on face action units annotations. Given desired AU labels, LAC-GAN utilizes local AU regional rules to control the status of each AU and attentive mechanism to combine several of them into the whole photo-realistic facial expressions or arbitrary facial expressions. In addition, unpaired training data is utilized in our proposed method to train the manipulation module with the corresponding AU labels, which learns a mapping between a facial expression manifold. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted on the commonly used BP4D dataset to verify the effectiveness of our proposed AU synthesis method.