Abstract The goal of face hallucination is to generate highresolution images with fifidelity from low-resolution ones. In contrast to existing methods based on patch similarity or holistic constraints in the image space, we propose to exploit local image structures for face hallucination. Each face image is represented in terms of facial components, contours and smooth regions. The image structure is maintained via matching gradients in the reconstructed highresolution output. For facial components, we align input images to generate accurate exemplars and transfer the high-frequency details for preserving structural consistency. For contours, we learn statistical priors to generate salient structures in the high-resolution images. A patch matching method is utilized on the smooth regions where the image gradients are preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm generates hallucinated face images with favorable quality and adaptability