Learning Simultaneous Face Super-Resolution Using Multiset Partial Least Squares

Face super-resolution (FSR) is an effective way to solve low-resolution (LR) problems in face analysis. But, most FSR methods only consider that LR face images have a single resolution, which is usually not consistent with practical situations due to the existence of multiple resolutions. To date, simultaneously learning the mappings from multiple LRs to high resolution (HR) has not been given proper attention. To solve this issue, we first propose a multi-set partial least squares (MPLS) approach to jointly deal with multi-set random variables via a recursive optimization. With MPLS, we then present a novel FSR method called MPLS-FH to simultaneously learn multiple resolution-specific mappings for various LR views from the same source. Concretely, MPLS-FH first divides multi-resolution face images into many patches. Then, it jointly learns the latent coherent features of principal-component embeddings of multi-resolution patches. Last, it super-resolves the input LR face by cross-resolution neighborhood search. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluations.