Deep face recognition for dim images

•The proposed framework effectively enhances the performance of deep face recognition for low illumination images.•Our feature restoration network achieves computational efficiency at the cost of only a few more parameters and FLOPs compared to the original feature extraction model. In addition, the training of this network does not require a massive dataset.•Our feature restoration network and embedding refinement module can be integrated with most existing deep face recognition models to create an end-to-end face recognition pipeline.