The Second Challenge on Real-World Face Restoration at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on real-world face restoration, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge focuses on generating natural and realistic outputs while maintaining identity consistency. Its goal is to advance state-of-the-art solutions for perceptual quality and realism, without imposing constraints on computational resources or training data. Performance is evaluated using a weighted image quality assessment (IQA) score and employs the AdaFace model as an identity checker. The competition attracted 96 registrants, with 10 teams submitting valid models; ultimately, 9 teams achieved valid scores in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of real-world face restoration while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

Temporal aggregation of audio-visual modalities for emotion recognition

Emotion recognition has a pivotal role in affective computing and in human-computer interaction. The current technological developments lead to increased possibilities of collecting data about the emotional state of a person. In general, human perception regarding the emotion transmitted by a subject is based on vocal and visual information collected in the first seconds of interaction with the subject. As a consequence, the integration of verbal (i.e., speech) and non-verbal (i.e., image) information seems to be the preferred choice in most of the current approaches towards emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose a multimodal fusion technique for emotion recognition based on combining audio-visual modalities from a temporal window with different temporal offsets for each modality. We show that our proposed method outperforms other methods from the literature and human accuracy rating. The experiments are conducted over the open-access multimodal dataset CREMA-D.

Emotion Recognition System from Speech and Visual Information based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Emotion recognition has become an important field of research in the human-computer interactions domain. The latest advancements in the field show that combining visual with audio information lead to better results if compared to the case of using a single source of information separately. From a visual point of view, a human emotion can be recognized by analyzing the facial expression of the person. More precisely, the human emotion can be described through a combination of several Facial Action Units. In this paper, we propose a system that is able to recognize emotions with a high accuracy rate and in real time, based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks. In order to increase the accuracy of the recognition system, we analyze also the speech data and fuse the information coming from both sources, i.e., visual and audio. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for emotion recognition and the importance of combining visual with audio data.