SwinIFS: Landmark Guided Swin Transformer For Identity Preserving Face Super Resolution

TL;DR

SwinIFS introduces a landmark-guided Swin Transformer framework for face super-resolution, effectively preserving identity and structural details even at high magnification factors, with improved perceptual quality and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel landmark-guided super-resolution method using a Swin Transformer backbone that integrates structural priors for identity-preserving face reconstruction.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in perceptual quality and identity retention.

Achieves high-quality reconstructions at 8x magnification.

Balances accuracy and computational efficiency effectively.

Abstract

Face super-resolution aims to recover high-quality facial images from severely degraded low-resolution inputs, but remains challenging due to the loss of fine structural details and identity-specific features. This work introduces SwinIFS, a landmark-guided super-resolution framework that integrates structural priors with hierarchical attention mechanisms to achieve identity-preserving reconstruction at both moderate and extreme upscaling factors. The method incorporates dense Gaussian heatmaps of key facial landmarks into the input representation, enabling the network to focus on semantically important facial regions from the earliest stages of processing. A compact Swin Transformer backbone is employed to capture long-range contextual information while preserving local geometry, allowing the model to restore subtle facial textures and maintain global structural consistency. Extensive experiments on the CelebA benchmark demonstrate that SwinIFS achieves superior perceptual quality, sharper reconstructions, and improved identity retention; it consistently produces more photorealistic results and exhibits strong performance even under 8x magnification, where most methods fail to recover meaningful structure. SwinIFS also provides an advantageous balance between reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-world applications in facial enhancement, surveillance, and digital restoration. Our code, model weights, and results are available at https://github.com/Habiba123-stack/SwinIFS.