PFStorer: Personalized Face Restoration and Super-Resolution
Authors: Tuomas Varanka, Tapani Toivonen, Soumya Tripathy, Guoying Zhao, Erman Acar

Recent developments in face restoration have achieved remarkable results in producing high-quality and lifelike outputs. The stunning results however often fail to be faithful with respect to the identity of the person as the models lack necessary context. In this paper we explore the potential of personalized face restoration with diffusion models. In our approach a restoration model is personalized using a few images of the identity leading to tailored restoration with respect to the identity while retaining fine-grained details. By using independent trainable blocks for personalization the rich prior of a base restoration model can be exploited to its fullest. To avoid the model relying on parts of identity left in the conditioning low-quality images a generative regularizer is employed. With a learnable parameter the model learns to balance between the details generated based on the input image and the degree of personalization. Moreover we improve the training pipeline of face restoration models to enable an alignment-free approach. We showcase the robust capabilities of our approach in several real-world scenarios with multiple identities demonstrating our method's ability to generate fine-grained details with faithful restoration. In the user study we evaluate the perceptual quality and faithfulness of the generated details with our method being voted best 61% of the time compared to the second best with 25% of the votes.