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Global attention guided multi-scale network for face image super-resolution

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Abstract

Face image super-resolution (FSR) is a subtask of image super-resolution that aims to enhance the resolution of facial images. Previous FSR methods have leveraged facial prior information, such as parsing maps and landmarks, to improve their performance. However, these methods have not fully utilized the potential of this prior information, as they typically use the same network structure for different types of facial information. To address this limitation, we propose a new network structure called GAMFSR, which incorporates parsing map prior information and includes a global attention module (GAM) to improve the utilization of the parsing map. Additionally, we developed a multistage super-resolution network for preprocessing, which further improves the prediction accuracy. We conducted ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of GAM and the impact of different prior information. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the guidance of parsing map features and achieves better performance with less prior information.

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The raw/processed data required to reproduce these findings cannot be shared at this time as the data also form part of an ongoing study.

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Correspondence to Mingliang Liu.

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This work is supported by natural science foundation of Heilongjiang province of China (No. LH2020F046).

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Zhang, J., Liu, M. & Wang, X. Global attention guided multi-scale network for face image super-resolution. Machine Vision and Applications 34, 106 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-023-01460-9

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