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.
@article{arxiv.2603.16570,
title = {Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration},
author = {Amirhossein Kazerouni and Maitreya Suin and Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong and Sina Honari and Amanpreet Walia and Iqbal Mohomed and Konstantinos G. Derpanis and Babak Taati and Alex Levinshtein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16570},
year = {2026}
}