If anyone ever tries to use this in court I hope they call it "Face Hallucination" and not "Image Reconstruction". On the research side, I wonder what the point of this is. I find it interesting but of little practical value.
It's a way to refine their models. A systematic model-based representation of data is basically also a generator of that data.
Why is that? Blame Kolmogorov. There are deep connections between compression, serialization, and computation. An optimal compression scheme is a serialization and the Turing-complete program to decode it. For example: you can compress pi into a few lines of algorithm plus a starting constant like 4.
