Complete Face Recovery GAN: Unsupervised Joint Face Rotation and De-Occlusion From a Single-View Image

Yeong-Joon Ju, Gun-Hee Lee, Jung-Ho Hong, Seong-Whan Lee; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022, pp. 3711-3721

Although various face-related tasks have significantly advanced in recent years, occlusion and extreme pose still impede the achievement of higher performance. Existing face rotation or de-occlusion methods only have emphasized the aspect of each problem. In addition, the lack of high-quality paired data remains an obstacle for both methods. In this work, we present a self-supervision strategy called Swap-R&R to overcome the lack of ground-truth in a fully unsupervised manner for joint face rotation and de-occlusion. To generate an input pair for self-supervision, we transfer the occlusion from a face in an image to an estimated 3D face and create a damaged face image, as if rotated from a different pose by rotating twice with the roughly de-occluded face. Furthermore, we propose Complete Face Recovery GAN (CFR-GAN) to restore the collapsed textures and disappeared occlusion areas by leveraging the structural and textural differences between two rendered images. Unlike previous works, which have selected occlusion-free images to obtain ground-truths, our approach does not require human intervention and paired data. We show that our proposed method can generate a de-occluded frontal face image from an occluded profile face image. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can boost the performance of facial recognition and facial expression recognition. The code is publicly available.