On the one hand, the dehazing task is an illposedness problem, which means that no unique solution exists. On the other hand, the dehazing task should take into account the subjective factor, which is to give the user selectable dehazed images rather than a single result. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-output dehazing network by introducing illumination controllable ability, called IC-Dehazing. The proposed IC-Dehazing can change the illumination intensity by adjusting the factor of the illumination controllable module, which is realized based on the interpretable Retinex theory. Moreover, the backbone dehazing network of IC-Dehazing consists of a Transformer with double decoders for high-quality image restoration. Further, the prior-based loss function and unsupervised training strategy enable IC-Dehazing to complete the parameter learning process without the need for paired data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed IC-Dehazing, quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted on image dehazing, semantic segmentation, and object detection tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/ICDehazing.
Text as Illumination: Spatial Contrastive Retinex Learning for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation
School of Software Technology & DUT-RU International School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院 & 大连理工大学-俄罗斯国际信息科学与工程学院）；School of Future Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学未来技术学院）；Central Hospital of Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学中心医院）；Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学肿瘤医院）；College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）
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 …
In this paper the use of Random Sprays Retinex (RSR) algorithm for global illumination estimation is proposed and its feasibility tested. Like other algorithms based on the Retinex model, RSR also provides local illumination estimation and brightness adjustment for each pixel and it is faster than other path-wise Retinex algorithms. As the assumption of the uniform illumination holds in many cases, it should be possible to use the mean of local illumination estimations of RSR as a global illumination estimation for images with (assumed) uniform illumination allowing also the accuracy to be eas…
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）
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…
Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Nigeria Nsukka（尼日利亚恩苏卡大学电子工程系）
This report describes the experimental results obtained using a proposed variational Retinex algorithm for controlled illumination correction. Two colour restoration and enhancement schemes of the algorithm are presented for drastically improved results. The algorithm modifies the reflectance image using global and local contrast enhancement approaches and gradually removes the residual illumination to yield highly pleasing results. The proposed algorithms are optimized by way of simultaneous perceptual quality metric (PQM) stabilization and entropy maximization for fully automated processing …
Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；NEC Laboratories America（美国NEC实验室）；Tianyi Traffic Technology（天易交通科技）；Duke University（杜克大学）
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…
Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学机械与运载工程学院）；School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学工程科学学院）；National Innovation Center of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles（国家智能网联汽车创新中心）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与运载学院）
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；National Institute of Technology（国家技术学院）
Haze limits the visibility of outdoor images, due to the existence of fog, smoke and dust in the atmosphere. Image dehazing methods try to recover haze-free image by removing the effect of haze from a given input image. In this paper, we present an end to end system, which takes a hazy image as its input and returns a dehazed image. The proposed method learns the mapping between a hazy image and its corresponding transmittance map and the environmental illumination, by using a multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network. Although most of the time haze appears grayish in color, its color may vary …
Palm vein recognition is a novel biometric identification technology. But how to gain a better vein extraction result from the raw palm image is still a challenging problem, especially when the raw data collection has the problem of asymmetric illumination. This paper proposes a method based on single scale Retinex algorithm to extract palm vein image when strong shadow presents due to asymmetric illumination and uneven geometry of the palm. We test our method on a multispectral palm image. The experimental result shows that the proposed method is robust to the influence of illumination angle …
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…
Light 'em Up: Enabling Few-Shot Low-Light 3D Gaussian Splatting with Multi-Scale Explicit Retinex Illumination Decoupling
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院航空航天信息研究所）；Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT)（目标认知与应用技术重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
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…
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）
Aerial images are often degraded by space-varying motion blur and simultaneous uneven illumination. To recover high-quality aerial image from its non-uniform version, we propose a novel patch-wise restoration approach based on a key observation that the degree of blurring is inevitably affected by the illuminated conditions. A non-local Retinex model is developed to accurately estimate the reflectance component from the degraded aerial image. Thereafter the uneven illumination is corrected well. And then non-uniform coupled blurring in the enhanced reflectance image is alleviated and transform…
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；College of Mathematics and Statistics, Chongqing University（重庆大学数学与统计学院）
Haze removal has been a very challenging problem due to its ill-posedness, which is more ill-posed if the input data is only a single hazy image. In this paper, we present a new approach for removing haze from a single input image. The proposed method combines the model widely used to describe the formation of a haze image with the assumption in Retinex that an image is the product of the illumination and the reflection. We assume that the depth and reflection functions are spatially piecewise smooth in the model, where the total variation is used for the regularization. The proposed model is …
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…
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；Indian Statistical Institute Calcutta（印度统计研究所加尔各答分所）
Haze and fog reduce the visibility of outdoor scenes as a veil like semi-transparent layer appears over the objects. As a result, images captured under such conditions lack contrast. Image dehazing methods try to alleviate this problem by recovering a clear version of the image. In this paper, we propose a Fully Convolutional Neural Network based model to recover the clear scene radiance by estimating the environmental illumination and the scene transmittance jointly from a hazy image. The method uses a relaxed haze imaging model to allow for the situations with non-uniform illumination. We ha…
LightenDiffusion: Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement with Latent-Retinex Diffusion Models
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Peking University（北京大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
In recent years, single image dehazing deep models based on Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM) have achieved remarkable results. But the dehazing outputs of those models suffer from color shift. Analyzing the ASM model shows that the atmospheric light factor (ALF) is set as a scalar which indicates ALF is constant for whole image. However, for images taken in real-world, the illumination is not uniformly distributed over whole image which brings model mismatch and possibly results in color shift of the deep models using ASM. Bearing this in mind, in this study, first, a new non-homogeneous atm…
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 …
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 …
RefLSM: Linearized Structural-Prior Reflectance Model for Medical Image Segmentation and Bias-Field Correction
College of Mathematics and Statistics, Chongqing University（重庆大学数学与统计学院）；Deparment of Computer Science, Duke University（杜克大学计算机科学系）；The University of Queensland Brisbane（昆士兰大学布里斯班分校）；Department of Radiation Oncology and Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University（埃默里大学放射肿瘤科和Winship癌症研究所）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61 CSIRO, Australia（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61部(CSIRO Data61)，澳大利亚(注：Data61是CSIRO的下属研究机构，按要求提取到公司/研究院级别，此处CSIRO为公司/研究院级别机构，Data61为其下属研究机构，故整体保留为Data61 CSIRO, Australia)）
Single-image haze-removal is challenging due to limited information contained in one single image. Previous solutions largely rely on handcrafted priors to compensate for this deficiency. Recent convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been used to learn haze-related priors but they ultimately work as advanced image filters. In this paper we propose a novel semantic ap- proach towards single image haze removal. Unlike existing methods, we infer color priors based on extracted semantic features. We argue that semantic context can be exploited to give informative cues for (a) learning colo…
Universitatea Politehnica Timisoara（蒂米什瓦拉理工大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Merantix GmbH（Merantix有限公司）；Universite Catholique de Louvain（鲁汶天主教大学）
Image dehazing has become an important computational imaging topic in the recent years. However, due to the lack of ground truth images, the comparison of dehazing methods is not straightforward, nor objective. To overcome this issue we introduce a new dataset -named I-HAZE- that contains 35 image pairs of hazy and corresponding haze-free (ground-truth) indoor images. Different from most of the existing dehazing databases, hazy images have been generated using real haze produced by a professional haze machine. For easy color calibration and improved assessment of dehazing algorithms, each scen…
Haze removal is important for computational photography and computer vision applications. However, most of the existing methods for dehazing are designed for daytime images, and cannot always work well in the nighttime. Different from the imaging conditions in the daytime, images captured in nighttime haze condition may suffer from non-uniform illumination due to artificial light sources, which exhibit low brightness/contrast and color distortion. In this paper, we present a new nighttime hazy imaging model that takes into account both the non-uniform illumination from artificial light sources…
Universitatea Politehnica Timisoara（蒂米什瓦拉理工大学）；University of Girona（赫罗纳大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Single image dehazing is an ill-posed problem that has recently drawn important attention. Despite the significant increase in interest shown for dehazing over the past few years, the validation of the dehazing methods remains largely unsatisfactory, due to the lack of pairs of real hazy and corresponding haze-free reference images. To address this limitation, we introduce Dense-Haze - a novel dehazing dataset. Characterized by dense and homogeneous hazy scenes, Dense-Haze contains 33 pairs of real hazy and corresponding haze-free images of various outdoor scenes. The hazy scenes have been rec…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Low-light image enhancement is generally regarded as a challenging task in image processing, especially for the complex visual tasks at night or weakly illuminated. In order to reduce the blurs or noises on the low-light images, a large number of papers have contributed to applying different technologies. Regretfully, most of them had served little purposes in coping with the extremely poor illumination parts of images or test in practice. In this work, the authors propose a novel approach for processing low-light images based on the Retinex theory and generative adversarial network (GAN), whi…
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…
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）
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Merantix GmbH（梅兰蒂克斯有限公司）；MEO, Universitatea Politehnica Timisoara（蒂米什瓦拉理工大学MEO）；ICTEAM, Universite Catholique de Louvain（鲁汶天主教大学ICTEAM）
Haze removal or dehazing is a challenging ill-posed problem that has drawn a significant attention in the last few years. Despite this growing interest, the scientific community is still lacking a reference dataset to evaluate objectively and quantitatively the performance of proposed dehazing methods. The few datasets that are currently considered, both for assessment and training of learning-based dehazing techniques, exclusively rely on synthetic hazy images. To address this limitation, we introduce the first outdoor scenes database (named O-HAZE) composed of pairs of real hazy and correspo…
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…
CLIP-Guided Data Augmentation for Night-Time Image Dehazing
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Jinan University（济南大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
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）
