FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restoration

Zihao Zou, Jiaming Liu, Shirin Shoushtari, Yubo Wang, Ulugbek S. Kamilov; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 5228-5238

Face video restoration (FVR) is a challenging but important problem where one seeks to recover a perceptually realistic face videos from a low-quality input. While diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have been shown to achieve remarkable performance for face image restoration they often fail to preserve temporally coherent high-quality videos compromising the fidelity of reconstructed faces. We present a new conditional diffusion framework called FLAIR for FVR. FLAIR ensures improved temporal alignments across frames in a computationally efficient fashion by converting a traditional image DPM into a video DPM. The proposed conversion uses a recurrent video refinement layer and a temporal self-attention at different scales. FLAIR also uses a conditional iterative refinement process to balance the perceptual and distortion quality during inference. This process consists of two key components: a data-consistency module that analytically ensures that the generated video precisely matches its degraded observation and a coarse-to-fine image enhancement module specifically for facial regions. Our extensive experiments show superiority of FLAIR over the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) for video super-resolution deblurring JPEG restoration and space-time frame interpolation on two high-quality face video datasets.