Unleashing the Potential of Transformer Flow for Photorealistic Face Restoration

Unleashing the Potential of Transformer Flow for Photorealistic Face Restoration

Kepeng Xu, Li Xu, Gang He, Wei Chen, Xianyun Wu, Wenxin Yu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2098-2106. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/234

Face restoration is a challenging task due to the need to remove artifacts and restore details. Traditional methods usually use generative model prior to achieve face restoration, but the restored results are still insufficient in terms of realism and details. In this paper, we introduce OmniFace, a novel face restoration framework that leverages Transformer-based diffusion flow. By exploiting the scaling property of Transformer, OmniFace achieves high-resolution restoration with exceptional realism and detail. The framework integrates three key components: (1) a Transformer-driven vector estimation network, (2) a representation aligned ControlNet, and (3) an adaptive training strategy for face restoration. The inherent scaling law of Transformer architectures enables the restoration of high-quality faces at high resolution. The controlnet combined with pre-trained diffusion representation can be easily trained. The adaptive training strategy provides a vector field that is more suitable for face restoration. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OmniFace outperforms existing techniques in terms of restoration quality across multiple benchmark datasets, especially in restoring photographic-level texture details in high-resolution scenes.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Computational photography
Computer Vision: CV: Image and video synthesis and generation 
Computer Vision: CV: Low-level Vision