Towards Controllable Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Continuous Multi-illumination Dataset and Efficient State Space Framework
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（澳门大学计算机与信息科学系）；School of Automation, China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学自动化学院）；Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Macau（澳门大学机电工程系）
Hongru Han, Tingrui Guo, Liming Zhang, Yan Su, Qiwen Xu, Zhuohua Ye
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) has traditionally been formulated as a deterministic mapping. However, this paradigm often struggles to account for the ill-posed nature of the task, where unknown ambient conditions and sensor parameters create a multimodal solution space. Consequently, state-of-the-art methods frequently encounter luminance discrepancies between predictions and labels, often necessitating "gt-mean" post-processing to align output luminance for evaluation. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a transition toward Controllable Low-light Enhancement (CLE), explicitly reformulating the task as a well-posed conditional problem. To this end, we introduce CLE-RWKV, a holistic framework supported by Light100, a new benchmark featuring continuous real-world illumination transitions. To resolve the conflict between luminance control and chromatic fidelity, a noise-decoupled supervision strategy in the HVI color space is employed, effectively separating illumination modulation from texture restoration. Architecturally, to adapt efficient State Space Models (SSMs) for dense prediction, we leverage a Space-to-Depth (S2D) strategy. By folding spatial neighborhoods into channel dimensions, this design allows the model to recover local inductive biases and effectively bridge the "scanning gap" inherent in flattened visual sequences without sacrificing linear complexity. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance and robust controllability, providing a real-world multi-illumination alternative that significantly reduces the reliance on gt-mean post-processing.
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…
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）
This report presents the results of a sky detection technique used to improve the performance of a previously developed partial differential equation (PDE)-based hazy image enhancement algorithm. Additionally, a proposed alternative method utilizes a function for log illumination refinement to improve de-hazing results while avoiding over-enhancement of sky or homogeneous regions. The algorithms were tested with several benchmark and calibration images and compared with several standard algorithms from the literature. Results indicate that the algorithms yield mostly consistent results and sur…
InterLight: Leveraging Intrinsic Illumination Priors for Low-Light Image Enhancement
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院多媒体软件国家工程研究中心）；Department of Computer Science, University of Macau（澳门大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Vision, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（马尔代夫穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学计算机视觉系）；School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东技术大学信息工程学院）
SAIGFormer: A Spatially-Adaptive Illumination-Guided Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau（数据科学学院，澳门城市大学）；College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China)（海洋科学与空间信息学院，中国石油大学（华东））；School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast（电子、电气与计算机科学学院，女王大学 Belfast）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（自动化系，清华大学）；College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（计算机科学与软件工程学院，深圳大学）
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…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore
Despite the quality improvement brought by the recent methods, video super-resolution (SR) is still very challenging, especially for videos that are low-light and noisy. The current best solution is to subsequently employ best models of video SR, denoising, and illumination enhancement, but doing so often lowers the image quality, due to the inconsistency between the models. This paper presents a new parametric representation called the Deep Parametric 3D Filters (DP3DF), which incorporates local spatiotemporal information to enable simultaneous denoising, illumination enhancement, and SR effi…
AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学机械与车辆工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学电气与计算机工程系）；Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学赫伯特·韦特海姆工程学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Qingdao University（青岛大学数学与统计学院）；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）
ISALux: Illumination and Segmentation Aware Transformer Employing Mixture of Experts for Low Light Image Enhancement
Department of Computer Science University of Manchester（计算机科学系曼彻斯特大学）；Department of Computer and Information Technology Politehnica University of Timisoara（计算机与信息科技系蒂森纳理工大学）
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…
When capturing images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility, which not only degrades the visual aesthetics of images, but also significantly degenerates the performance of many computer vision algorithms. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised low-light image enhancement framework (SID-NISM), which consists of two components, a Self-supervised Image Decomposition Network (SID-Net) and a Nonlinear Illumination Saturation Mapping function (NISM). As a self-supervised network, SID-Net could decompose the given low-light image into its reflectance, illumination …
State Key Laboratory Of Information Security（信息安全国家重点实验室）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
When one captures images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility. This poor quality may significantly degrade the performance of many computer vision and multimedia algorithms that are primarily designed for high-quality inputs. In this paper, we propose a very simple and effective method, named as LIME, to enhance low-light images. More concretely, the illumination of each pixel is first estimated individually by finding the maximum value in R, G and B channels. Further, we refine the initial illumination map by imposing a structure prior on it, as the final illum…
Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学机械与车辆工程学院）；Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学赫伯特·韦特海姆工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学电气与计算机工程系）；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）
CLIP-Optimized Multimodal Image Enhancement via ISP-CNN Fusion for Coal Mine IoVT under Uneven Illumination
School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing)（中国矿业大学（北京）人工智能学院）；Ministry of Emergency Management Big Data Center（应急管理部大数据中心）
Low-Light Image Enhancement with Illumination-Aware Gamma Correction and Complete Image Modelling Network
Meituan Inc.（美团公司）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Editing flat-looking images into stunning photographs requires skill and time. Automated image enhancement algorithms have attracted increased interest by generating high-quality images without user interaction. However, the quality assessment of a photograph is subjective. Even in tone and color adjustments, a single photograph of auto-enhancement is challenging to fit user preferences which are subtle and even changeable. To address this problem, we present a semiautomatic image enhancement algorithm that can generate high-quality images with multiple styles by controlling a few parameters. …
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…
ALEN: A Dual-Approach for Uniform and Non-Uniform Low-Light Image Enhancement
School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Gongshang University（计算机科学与技术学院，浙江工商大学）；Depto. de Ingeniería Electro-fotónica, Universidad de Guadalajara（电子光子工程系，瓜达拉哈拉大学）
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…
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学）；National Tsing Hua University（清华大学（台湾））
Low-light image enhancement aims to improve an image's visibility while keeping its visual naturalness. Different from existing methods tending to accomplish the relighting task directly by ignoring the fidelity and naturalness recovery, we investigate the intrinsic degradation and relight the low-light image while refining the details and color in two steps. Inspired by the color image formulation (diffuse illumination color plus environment illumination color), we first estimate the degradation from low-light inputs to simulate the distortion of environment illumination color, and then refin…
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…
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）
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）
In this paper, we tackle the problem of enhancing real-world low-light images with significant noise in an unsupervised fashion. Conventional unsupervised learning-based approaches usually tackle the low-light image enhancement problem using an image-to-image translation model. They focus primarily on illumination or contrast enhancement but fail to suppress the noise that ubiquitously exists in images taken under real-world low-light conditions. To address this issue, we explicitly decouple this task into two sub-tasks: illumination enhancement and noise suppression. We propose to learn a two…
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…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）
Challenging illumination conditions (low-light, under-exposure and over-exposure) in the real world not only cast an unpleasant visual appearance but also taint the computer vision tasks. After camera captures the raw-RGB data, it renders standard sRGB images with image signal processor (ISP). By decomposing ISP pipeline into local and global image components, we propose a lightweight fast Illumination Adaptive Transformer (IAT) to restore the normal lit sRGB image from either low-light or under/over-exposure conditions. Specifically, IAT uses attention queries to represent and adjust the ISP-…
GTFMN: Guided Texture and Feature Modulation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement and Super-Resolution
1 Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan 2 Dept. of Radiology \& Biomedical Imaging, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA 3 Dept. of Computer Science；Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 4 Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 5 Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；The Open University of Hong Kong（香港公开大学）
Maritime images captured under low-light imaging condition easily suffer from low visibility and unexpected noise, leading to negative effects on maritime traffic supervision and management. To promote imaging performance, it is necessary to restore the important visual information from degraded low-light images. In this paper, we propose to enhance the low-light images through regularized illumination optimization and deep noise suppression. In particular, a hybrid regularized variational model, which combines L0-norm gradient sparsity prior with structure-aware regularization, is presented t…
LightQANet: Quantized and Adaptive Feature Learning for Low-Light Image Enhancement
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机科学与软件工程学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机与数据科学学院）；Computer Vision Institute, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机视觉研究院）；School of AI and Advanced Computing, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学人工智能与先进计算学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Changsha University of Science and Technology（长沙理工大学数学与统计学院）；School of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China（宁波大学计算机科学系）
Rain removal plays an important role in the restoration of degraded images. Recently, data-driven methods have achieved remarkable success. However, these approaches neglect that the appearance of rain is often accompanied by low light conditions, which will further degrade the image quality. Therefore, it is very indispensable to jointly remove the rain and enhance the light for real-world rain image restoration. In this paper, we aim to address this problem from two aspects. First, we proposed a novel entangled network, namely EMNet, which can remove the rain and enhance illumination in one …
