Does face restoration improve face verification?

Methods for face verification works reasonably well on face images with standardized (frontal) face positions and good spatial resolution. However such methods have significant challenges on poor resolution images, poor lighting conditions and not standard (frontal) face positions. In this paper, we survey the capability of existing face restoration and verification methods, with the aim of understanding how useful face restoration methods are for face verification. We propose a qualitative and quantitative comparison benchmark, and apply it on eight methods for face restoration and six methods for face verification, on several real-world low-quality images from a surveillance context, and outline observed advantages and limitations. Experiments shows that each restoration method can affect each face verification method differently, with fewer than the half of face restoration methods helping face verification. Interestingly, some face restoration methods with less good qualitative evaluation helped face verification the most. Experiments also show that face verification works less good if the resolution decreases.