Degradation-Agnostic Statistical Facial Feature Transformation for Blind Face Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel GAN-based face restoration framework that effectively handles weather-induced degradations by using local statistical feature transformation and degradation-agnostic embedding, improving facial detail and structure recovery.

Contribution

The paper proposes a degradation-agnostic face restoration method combining local statistical facial feature transformation and robust feature embedding, addressing weather-related image degradations explicitly.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art FIR methods in weather-affected scenarios.

Enhances facial structural fidelity and perceptual quality.

Effectively suppresses texture distortions in degraded images.

Abstract

With the increasing deployment of intelligent CCTV systems in outdoor environments, there is a growing demand for face recognition systems optimized for challenging weather conditions. Adverse weather significantly degrades image quality, which in turn reduces recognition accuracy. Although recent face image restoration (FIR) models based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models have shown progress, their performance remains limited due to the lack of dedicated modules that explicitly address weather-induced degradations. This leads to distorted facial textures and structures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel GAN-based blind FIR framework that integrates two key components: local Statistical Facial Feature Transformation (SFFT) and Degradation-Agnostic Feature Embedding (DAFE). The local SFFT module enhances facial structure and color fidelity by aligning the local statistical distributions of low-quality (LQ) facial regions with those of high-quality (HQ) counterparts. Complementarily, the DAFE module enables robust statistical facial feature extraction under adverse weather conditions by aligning LQ and HQ encoder representations, thereby making the restoration process adaptive to severe weather-induced degradations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed degradation-agnostic SFFT model outperforms existing state-of-the-art FIR methods based on GAN and diffusion models, particularly in suppressing texture distortions and accurately reconstructing facial structures. Furthermore, both the SFFT and DAFE modules are empirically validated in enhancing structural fidelity and perceptual quality in face restoration under challenging weather scenarios.