When enhancing low-light images, many deep learning algorithms are based on the Retinex theory. However, the Retinex model does not consider the corruptions hidden in the dark or introduced by the light-up process. Besides, these methods usually require a tedious multi-stage training pipeline and rely on convolutional neural networks, showing limitations in capturing long-range dependencies. In this paper, we formulate a simple yet principled One-stage Retinex-based Framework (ORF). ORF first estimates the illumination information to light up the low-light image and then restores the corruption to produce the enhanced image. We design an Illumination-Guided Transformer (IGT) that utilizes illumination representations to direct the modeling of non-local interactions of regions with different lighting conditions. By plugging IGT into ORF, we obtain our algorithm, Retinexformer. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our Retinexformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on thirteen benchmarks. The user study and application on low-light object detection also reveal the latent practical values of our method. Code, models, and results are available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Retinexformer
This paper proposes a novel image contrast enhancement method based on both a noise aware shadow-up function and Retinex (retina and cortex) decomposition. Under low light conditions, images taken by digital cameras have low contrast in dark or bright regions. This is due to a limited dynamic range that imaging sensors have. For this reason, various contrast enhancement methods have been proposed. Our proposed method can enhance the contrast of images without not only over-enhancement but also noise amplification. In the proposed method, an image is decomposed into illumination layer and refle…
Retinex model is an effective tool for low-light image enhancement. It assumes that observed images can be decomposed into the reflectance and illumination. Most existing Retinex-based methods have carefully designed hand-crafted constraints and parameters for this highly ill-posed decomposition, which may be limited by model capacity when applied in various scenes. In this paper, we collect a LOw-Light dataset (LOL) containing low/normal-light image pairs and propose a deep Retinex-Net learned on this dataset, including a Decom-Net for decomposition and an Enhance-Net for illumination adjustm…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Self-regularized low-light image enhancement does not require any normal-light image in training, thereby freeing from the chains on paired or unpaired low-/normal-images. However, existing methods suffer color deviation and fail to generalize to various lighting conditions. This paper presents a novel self-regularized method based on Retinex, which, inspired by HSV, preserves all colors (Hue, Saturation) and only integrates Retinex theory into brightness (Value). We build a reflectance estimation network by restricting the consistency of reflectances embedded in both the original and a novel …
Low-light image enhancement plays very important roles in low-level vision field. Recent works have built a large variety of deep learning models to address this task. However, these approaches mostly rely on significant architecture engineering and suffer from high computational burden. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Architecture Search (RUAS), to construct lightweight yet effective enhancement network for low-light images in real-world scenario. Specifically, building upon Retinex rule, RUAS first establishes models to characterize the intrinsic…
IllumFlow: Illumination-Adaptive Low-Light Enhancement via Conditional Rectified Flow and Retinex Decomposition
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学数学与统计学学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi'an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学数学与统计学学院）
Low-light Image Enhancement with Retinex Decomposition in Latent Space
School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学自动化学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Jiaxing University（嘉兴大学人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence at Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering（达亚南达·萨加尔工程学院）
A new approach for tuning the parameters of MultiScale Retinex (MSR) based color image enhancement algorithm using a popular optimization method, namely, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is presented in this paper. The image enhancement using MSR scheme heavily depends on parameters such as Gaussian surround space constant, number of scales, gain and offset etc. Selection of these parameters, empirically and its application to MSR scheme to produce inevitable results are the major blemishes. The method presented here results in huge savings of computation time as well as improvement in the vi…
Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering（达亚南达·萨加尔工程学院）
This paper presents a new color image enhancement technique based on modified MultiScale Retinex(MSR) algorithm and visual quality of the enhanced images are evaluated using a new metric, namely, wavelet energy. The color image enhancement is achieved by down sampling the value component of HSV color space converted image into three scales (normal, medium and fine) following the contrast stretching operation. These down sampled value components are enhanced using the MSR algorithm. The value component is reconstructed by averaging each pixels of the lower scale image with that of the upper sca…
DI-Retinex: Digital-Imaging Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；The School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；The School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区网络空间科学与技术学院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The Retinex model is one of the most representative and effective methods for low-light image enhancement. However, the Retinex model does not explicitly tackle the noise problem, and shows unsatisfactory enhancing results. In recent years, due to the excellent performance, deep learning models have been widely used in low-light image enhancement. However, these methods have two limitations: i) The desirable performance can only be achieved by deep learning when a large number of labeled data are available. However, it is not easy to curate massive low/normal-light paired data; ii) Deep learni…
Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（物理海洋学国家重点实验室和中国海洋大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen university（中山大学深圳校区计算机科学与技术学院）
INESC TEC Porto（INESC TEC波尔图）；Tecnalia；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；University of Cassino and L.M.（卡西诺大学和L.M.）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
Image dehazing deals with the removal of undesired loss of visibility in outdoor images due to the presence of fog. Retinex is a color vision model mimicking the ability of the Human Visual System to robustly discount varying illuminations when observing a scene under different spectral lighting conditions. Retinex has been widely explored in the computer vision literature for image enhancement and other related tasks. While these two problems are apparently unrelated, the goal of this work is to show that they can be connected by a simple linear relationship. Specifically, most Retinex-based …
Centre of Digital Technologies Education Research (CODER)（数字技术教育研究中心（CODER））；ICT, School of Technology, Environments & Design（技术、环境与设计学院信息与通信技术（ICT））；University of Tasmania（塔斯马尼亚大学）
This paper focuses on finding the most optimal pre-processing methods considering three common algorithms for image enhancement: Brightening, CLAHE and Retinex. For the purpose of image training in general, these methods will be combined to find out the most optimal method for image enhancement. We have carried out the research on the different permutation of three methods: Brightening, CLAHE and Retinex. The evaluation is based on Canny Edge detection applied to all processed images. Then the sharpness of objects will be justified by true positive pixels number in comparison between images. A…
This paper proposes a self-supervised low light image enhancement method based on deep learning, which can improve the image contrast and reduce noise at the same time to avoid the blur caused by pre-/post-denoising. The method contains two deep sub-networks, an Image Contrast Enhancement Network (ICE-Net) and a Re-Enhancement and Denoising Network (RED-Net). The ICE-Net takes the low light image as input and produces a contrast enhanced image. The RED-Net takes the result of ICE-Net and the low light image as input, and can re-enhance the low light image and denoise at the same time. Both of …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Contrast enhancement and noise removal are coupled problems for low-light image enhancement. The existing Retinex based methods do not take the coupling relation into consideration, resulting in under or over-smoothing of the enhanced images. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel progressive Retinex framework, in which illumination and noise of low-light image are perceived in a mutually reinforced manner, leading to noise reduction low-light enhancement results. Specifically, two fully pointwise convolutional neural networks are devised to model the statistical regularities of am…
Motivated by their recent advances, deep learning techniques have been widely applied to low-light image enhancement (LIE) problem. Among which, Retinex theory based ones, mostly following a decomposition-adjustment pipeline, have taken an important place due to its physical interpretation and promising performance. However, current investigations on Retinex based deep learning are still not sufficient, ignoring many useful experiences from traditional methods. Besides, the adjustment step is either performed with simple image processing techniques, or by complicated networks, both of which ar…
Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（山东中医药大学）；Taishan University（泰山学院）；Nankai University（南开大学）
Retinex model has been applied to low-light image enhancement in many existing methods. More appropriate decomposition of a low-light image can help achieve better image enhancement. In this paper, we propose a new pixel-level non-local Haar transform based illumination and reflectance decomposition method (NLHD). The unique low-frequency coefficient of Haar transform on each similar pixel group is used to reconstruct the illumination component, and the rest of all high-frequency coefficients are employed to reconstruct the reflectance component. The complete similarity of pixels in a matched …
Retinex-RAWMamba: Bridging Demosaicing and Denoising for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement
Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（科学技术大学先进技术研究院）；School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Technology and Business University（北京科技与商务大学计算机与人工智能学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（科学技术大学）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Low-light images, i.e. the images captured in low-light conditions, suffer from very poor visibility caused by low contrast, color distortion and significant measurement noise. Low-light image enhancement is about improving the visibility of low-light images. As the measurement noise in low-light images is usually significant yet complex with spatially-varying characteristic, how to handle the noise effectively is an important yet challenging problem in low-light image enhancement. Based on the Retinex decomposition of natural images, this paper proposes a deep learning method for low-light im…
Institute of Image Recognition and Artificial Intelligence（图像识别与人工智能研究所）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Images captured in low-light conditions usually suffer from very low contrast, which increases the difficulty of subsequent computer vision tasks in a great extent. In this paper, a low-light image enhancement model based on convolutional neural network and Retinex theory is proposed. Firstly, we show that multi-scale Retinex is equivalent to a feedforward convolutional neural network with different Gaussian convolution kernels. Motivated by this fact, we consider a Convolutional Neural Network(MSR-net) that directly learns an end-to-end mapping between dark and bright images. Different fundam…
Multinex: Lightweight Low-light Image Enhancement via Multi-prior Retinex
Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）；ETcTI, University Politehnica Timisoara（蒂米șoara工业大学ETcTI）；West University of Timisoara（蒂米șoara西大学）
Nankai University（南开大学）；Taishan University（泰山学院）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Shenzhen Institute of Future Media Technology（深圳未来媒体技术研究院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Retinex theory is developed mainly to decompose an image into the illumination and reflectance components by analyzing local image derivatives. In this theory, larger derivatives are attributed to the changes in reflectance, while smaller derivatives are emerged in the smooth illumination. In this paper, we utilize exponentiated local derivatives (with an exponent γ) of an observed image to generate its structure map and texture map. The structure map is produced by been amplified with γ > 1, while the texture map is generated by been shrank with γ < 1. To this end, we design exponential filte…
Xi’an University of Science and Technology（西安科技大学）
A novel color image enhancement method is proposed based on Retinex to enhance color images under non-uniform illumination or poor visibility conditions. Different from the conventional Retinex algorithms, the Weighted Guided Image Filter is used as a surround function instead of the Gaussian filter to estimate the background illumination, which can overcome the drawbacks of local blur and halo artifact that may appear by Gaussian filter. To avoid color distortion, the image is converted to the HSI color model, and only the intensity channel is enhanced. Then a linear color restoration algorit…
MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（电子科技大学神经信息教育部重点实验室（UESTC））；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（电子科技大学（UESTC））
Images obtained in real-world low-light conditions are not only low in brightness, but they also suffer from many other types of degradation, such as color distortion, unknown noise, detail loss and halo artifacts. In this paper, we propose a Degradation-Aware Deep Retinex Network (denoted as DA-DRN) for low-light image enhancement and tackle the above degradation. Based on Retinex Theory, the decomposition net in our model can decompose low-light images into reflectance and illumination maps and deal with the degradation in the reflectance during the decomposition phase directly. We propose a…
ERetinex: Event Camera Meets Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；School of Software, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）
RSEND: Retinex-based Squeeze and Excitation Network with Dark Region Detection for Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement
Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego（计算机科学与工程系，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California, Irvine（电气工程与计算机科学系，加州大学伊尔市分校）
A self-supervised adaptive low-light video enhancement method, called SALVE, is proposed in this work. SALVE first enhances a few key frames of an input low-light video using a retinex-based low-light image enhancement technique. For each keyframe, it learns a mapping from low-light image patches to enhanced ones via ridge regression. These mappings are then used to enhance the remaining frames in the low-light video. The combination of traditional retinex-based image enhancement and learning-based ridge regression leads to a robust, adaptive and computationally inexpensive solution to enhance…
In this paper, a novel image enhancement network is proposed, where HDR images are used for generating training data for our network. Most of conventional image enhancement methods, including Retinex based methods, do not take into account restoring lost pixel values caused by clipping and quantizing. In addition, recently proposed CNN based methods still have a limited scope of application or a limited performance, due to network architectures. In contrast, the proposed method have a higher performance and a simpler network architecture than existing CNN based methods. Moreover, the proposed …
We present a novel dehazing and low-light enhancement method based on an illumination map that is accurately estimated by a convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, the illumination map is used as a component for three different tasks, namely, atmospheric light estimation, transmission map estimation, and low-light enhancement. To train CNNs for dehazing and low-light enhancement simultaneously based on the retinex theory, we synthesize numerous low-light and hazy images from normal hazy images from the FADE data set. In addition, we further improve the network using detail enhanceme…
A Frequency-Aware Self-Supervised Learning for Ultra-Wide-Field Image Enhancement
College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo, China（中国科学院宁波材料技术与工程研究所）；Department of Eye and Vision Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK（利物浦大学眼科学与视觉科学系）；School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China（上海科技大学生物医学工程学院）
Low-light Image Enhancement via Multi-scale Attention combined with Fourier Transform
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学上海智能自主系统研究院）
This paper proposes a self-supervised low light image enhancement method based on deep learning. Inspired by information entropy theory and Retinex model, we proposed a maximum entropy based Retinex model. With this model, a very simple network can separate the illumination and reflectance, and the network can be trained with low light images only. We introduce a constraint that the maximum channel of the reflectance conforms to the maximum channel of the low light image and its entropy should be largest in our model to achieve self-supervised learning. Our model is very simple and does not re…
This paper proposes a new light-weight convolutional neural network (5k parameters) for non-uniform illumination image enhancement to handle color, exposure, contrast, noise and artifacts, etc., simultaneously and effectively. More concretely, the input image is first enhanced using Retinex model from dual different aspects (enhancing under-exposure and suppressing over-exposure), respectively. Then, these two enhanced results and the original image are fused to obtain an image with satisfactory brightness, contrast and details. Finally, the extra noise and compression artifacts are removed to…
Many low-light enhancement methods ignore intensive noise in original images. As a result, they often simultaneously enhance the noise as well. Furthermore, extra denoising procedures adopted by most methods ruin the details. In this paper, we introduce a joint low-light enhancement and denoising strategy, aimed at obtaining well-enhanced low-light images while getting rid of the inherent noise issue simultaneously. The proposed method performs Retinex model based decomposition in a successive sequence, which sequentially estimates a piece-wise smoothed illumination and a noise-suppressed refl…
