Restoration of the JPEG Maximum Lossy Compressed Face Images with Hourglass Block based on Early Stopping Discriminator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GAN-based method with an hourglass U-Net generator and dual loss functions to effectively restore highly compressed JPEG face images, removing blocking artifacts and recovering recognizable identities.

Contribution

It proposes a novel GAN architecture with an hourglass U-Net and dual loss functions tailored for restoring heavily compressed JPEG images, improving over previous methods.

Findings

Blocking artifacts were effectively removed from compressed images.

Restored images retained recognizable facial identities.

The method outperformed previous restoration techniques.

Abstract

When a JPEG image is compressed using the loss compression method with a high compression rate, a blocking phenomenon can occur in the image, making it necessary to restore the image to its original quality. In particular, restoring compressed images that are unrecognizable presents an innovative challenge. Therefore, this paper aims to address the restoration of JPEG images that have suffered significant loss due to maximum compression using a GAN-based net-work method. The generator in this network is based on the U-Net architecture and features a newly presented hourglass structure that can preserve the charac-teristics of deep layers. Additionally, the network incorporates two loss functions, LF Loss and HF Loss, to generate natural and high-performance images. HF Loss uses a pretrained VGG-16 network and is configured using a specific layer that best represents features, which can enhance performance for the high-frequency region. LF Loss, on the other hand, is used to handle the low-frequency region. These two loss functions facilitate the generation of images by the generator that can deceive the discriminator while accurately generating both high and low-frequency regions. The results show that the blocking phe-nomenon in lost compressed images was removed, and recognizable identities were generated. This study represents a significant improvement over previous research in terms of image restoration performance.