Learning a High Fidelity Pose Invariant Model for High-resolution Face Frontalization

TL;DR

This paper introduces HF-PIM, a novel high-fidelity model for high-resolution face frontalization that preserves identity and details by combining texture warping, dense correspondence, and adversarial learning, outperforming previous methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new pose-invariant face frontalization model that uses a texture warping procedure, dense correspondence, and adversarial residual dictionary learning to improve high-resolution results.

Findings

Enhances pose-invariant face recognition performance.

Produces high-quality, identity-preserving frontal face images.

Effective in both controlled and wild environments.

Abstract

Face frontalization refers to the process of synthesizing the frontal view of a face from a given profile. Due to self-occlusion and appearance distortion in the wild, it is extremely challenging to recover faithful results and preserve texture details in a high-resolution. This paper proposes a High Fidelity Pose Invariant Model (HF-PIM) to produce photographic and identity-preserving results. HF-PIM frontalizes the profiles through a novel texture warping procedure and leverages a dense correspondence field to bind the 2D and 3D surface spaces. We decompose the prerequisite of warping into dense correspondence field estimation and facial texture map recovering, which are both well addressed by deep networks. Different from those reconstruction methods relying on 3D data, we also propose Adversarial Residual Dictionary Learning (ARDL) to supervise facial texture map recovering with only monocular images. Exhaustive experiments on both controlled and uncontrolled environments demonstrate that the proposed method not only boosts the performance of pose-invariant face recognition but also dramatically improves high-resolution frontalization appearances.