FaceFormer: Aggregating Global and Local Representation for Face Hallucination

Recently, face hallucination methods either feed whole face image into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or utilize extra facial priors (e.g., facial parsing maps and landmarks) to focus on global facial structure and constrain facial texture generation. However, the limited receptive fields of CNNs and inaccurate facial priors will reduce the naturalness and fidelity of restored face. In this paper, we propose a FaceFormer that aggregates global representation of Transformers and local representation of CNNs to maintain the consistency of facial structure while restoring local facial details. The reason for this design is that the Transformer can capture global facial information by exploiting the long-distance visual relation modeling, while the local modeling capability of CNNs can recover fine-grained facial details. Therefore, aggregating these two independent representations can help to maximize their merits and reconstruct high-quality and high-fidelity face images. Experimental results of face reconstruction and recognition verify that the proposed FaceFormer significantly outperforms current state-of-the-arts.