Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration

Amirhossein Kazerouni; Maitreya Suin; Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong; Sina Honari; Amanpreet Walia; Iqbal Mohomed; Konstantinos G. Derpanis; Babak Taati; Alex Levinshtein

arXiv · 2603.16570

Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration

Amirhossein Kazerouni·Maitreya Suin·Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong·Sina Honari·Amanpreet Walia·Iqbal Mohomed·Konstantinos G. Derpanis·Babak Taati·Alex Levinshtein

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Abstract

Recent advances in image restoration have enabled high-fidelity recovery of faces from degraded inputs using reference-based face restoration models (Ref-FR). However, such methods focus solely on facial regions, neglecting degradation across the full scene, including body and background, which limits practical usability. Meanwhile, full-scene restorers often ignore degradation cues entirely, leading to underdetermined predictions and visual artifacts. In this work, we propose Face2Scene, a two-stage restoration framework that leverages the face as a perceptual oracle to estimate degradation and guide the restoration of the entire image. Given a degraded image and one or more identity references, we first apply a Ref-FR model to reconstruct high-quality facial details. From the restored-degraded face pair, we extract a face-derived degradation code that captures degradation attributes (e.g., noise, blur, compression), which is then transformed into multi-scale degradation-aware tokens. These tokens condition a diffusion model to restore the full scene in a single step, including the body and background. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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Amirhossein Kazerouni, Maitreya Suin, Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong, Sina Honari, Amanpreet Walia, Iqbal Mohomed, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Babak Taati, Alex Levinshtein. 2026-04-08. Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16570

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