A Survey of Deep Face Restoration: Denoise, Super-Resolution, Deblur, Artifact Removal
This paper presents a systematic survey of deep learning–based facial image restoration, focusing on denoising, super-resolution, deblurring, and artifact removal. Addressing challenges such as strong facial structural priors and complex degradation modeling, we propose the first holistic taxonomy of methods, a unified evaluation framework, and an open-source benchmark repository encompassing 20+ state-of-the-art approaches—including fully reproducible implementations. Leveraging datasets like CelebA and FFHQ, we conduct comprehensive cross-method evaluations using PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS metrics, integrating CNN/Transformer architectures, perceptual and adversarial losses, and multi-scale feature fusion strategies. Our empirical analysis reveals performance boundaries and task-specific suitability across methods. Key contributions include: (1) the first structured, principle-driven classification system for facial restoration; (2) the first open, end-to-end benchmark platform supporting full method reproduction; (3) a rigorous, large-scale empirical study; and (4) concrete research directions concerning network design, evaluation paradigms, and dataset construction.