FSFVE: Few Shot Compressed Face Video Enhancement

Videocalling has become a popular form of communication in the world today, with many companies providing free services for it. However, there are still millions of people around the world that experience poor quality videocalls due to limitations in bandwidth. This despite, most people having the required hardware. In this paper we present a novel framework for enhancing highly compressed videocalls. We show, that with as little as 10 frames of the face, we can rapidly (in under 100 seconds) train a model to enhance that instance of the videocall. The model can be trained either prior to or during the call, enhancing the rest of the call by producing better quality video. The video conferencing application need not be modified - it can be off the shelf with our system as a layer on top that trains quickly then simply lets the video conferencing application (e.g. Zoom) run as usual, where our system intercepts and improves images before they are displayed. The model is designed to run in realtime on low-compute devices such as a typical laptop CPU. Experimentally, we show that the model significantly improves quality of compressed face video both quantitatively as well as perceptually. Code can be found at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSFVE.

Reference-Based Face Super-Resolution Using the Spatial Transformer

Face super-resolution is the task of increasing the resolution of an image containing a face thereby adding finer detail. It is a ubiquitous task in many computer vision applications and quite often the user isn't even aware that it is being performed. However, doing it with high fidelity is challenging as it is an ill-posed problem. In this paper we present a reference-based solution for face super-resolution that uses higher resolution reference images to aid in the task. We show an alignment module based on the spatial transformer that is considerably more stable than the popular deformable convolutions. We also show an aggregation function that can take good quality information from the reference images when available or suppress the function when such information is unavailable. Finally, we show that our relatively smaller model can achieve state of the art results on multiple datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSRST.

RTFVE: Realtime Face Video Enhancement

There's been a surge in adoption of video conferencing applications for both personal and business use cases. However, the bandwidth limitations faced by many users worldwide may restrict the optimal use of such applications. Although deep learning offers a solution for enhancing low bit rate videos, most models today are either hard to incorporate with modern compression standards or require specialized hardware to run such as significant GPUs making these models impractical. To address these issues, we introduce the Realtime Face Video Enhancement (RTFVE) model which can be easily incorporated with any video decoder and can run in realtime on ordinary CPUs. Experiments show that our model improves perceptual quality over the compressed video baseline at multiple low bitrate settings. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/varun-jois/RTFVE.