Face hallucination based on cluster consistent dictionary learning

Face hallucination is a super‐resolution technique specially designed to reconstruct high‐resolution faces from low‐resolution faces. Most state‐of‐the‐art algorithms leverage position‐patch prior knowledge of human faces to better super‐resolve face images. However, most of them assume the training face dataset is sufficiently large, well cropped or aligned. This paper, proposes a novel example‐based face hallucination method, based on cluster consistent dictionary learning with the assumption that human faces have similar facial structures. In this method, the paired face image patches are firstly labelled as face areas including eyes, nose, mouth and other parts, as well as non‐face areas without requiring the training face images cropped and aligned. Then, the training patches are clustered according their labels and textures. The cluster consistent dictionary is learned to represent the low‐resolution patches and the high‐resolution patches. Finally, the high‐resolution patches of the input low‐resolution face image can be efficiently generated by using the adjusted anchored neighbourhood regression. As utilizing the labelled facial parts prior knowledge, the proposed method represents more details in the reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors' algorithm outperforms many state‐of‐the‐art techniques for face hallucination under different datasets.