arXiv Computer Vision

PRIN: A Perceptual-Structural Retinex-Inspired Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

The paper introduces PRIN, a Perceptual-Structural Retinex-Inspired Network designed for low‑light image enhancement. PRIN uses a shared encoder with asymmetric decoders to separately refine reflectance and illumination components, applying attention‑guided wavelet refinement for textures and edge preservation in the reflectance branch and spatially coherent brightness adjustment in the illumination branch. A curve‑based post‑composition head further corrects tone and exposure, achieving state‑of‑the‑art SSIM, LPIPS, and PSNR results on multiple LOL datasets.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

IDM-Net: A Lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

IDM-Net is a lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network designed for low-light image enhancement. It uses a dual-encoder architecture: a structure encoder extracts multi-scale appearance features from the RGB image, while a lightweight illumination encoder learns illumination priors from the decoupled luminance channel. An Illumination-Guided Modulation module injects these priors into the decoder via spatially adaptive affine modulation, and a Feature Refinement Block progressively suppresses artifacts and recovers fine details, achieving competitive performance on standard benchmarks with good balance between quality and efficiency.

By Cheng-Yen Hsiao, Jing-Ming Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Consist-Retinex: One-Step Noise-Emphasized Consistency Training Accelerates High-Quality Retinex Enhancement

Consist‑Retinex introduces a one‑step noise‑emphasized consistency training framework for Retinex‑based low‑light image enhancement. It first decomposes images into reflectance and illumination maps using a Retinex Transformer Decomposition Network, then trains two conditional consistency models with a dual objective that blends trajectory consistency and ground‑truth alignment. The method employs adaptive noise‑emphasized fixed‑point sampling to focus supervision near the inference endpoint, achieving state‑of‑the‑art VE‑LOL‑L scores on paired and unpaired low‑light benchmarks while reducing sampling and training costs.

By Jian Xu, Wei Chen, Shigui Li, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

MirrorDistill: Illumination-Aware Latent Distillation for Efficient Low-Light Restoration

MirrorDistill introduces an illumination‑aware latent distillation framework for low‑light image enhancement. It trains a lightweight student encoder‑decoder by aligning its intermediate features with clean‑domain targets generated by a teacher decoder, using feature mirroring and illumination‑aware weighting to emphasize underexposed regions. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the LOL‑v2‑Real benchmark while maintaining the lowest computational complexity, and the code is released as open source.

By Farida Mohsen, Tala Zaim, Nurul Izni Rusli, Ali Al-Zawqari, Ali Safa, Samir Brahim Belhaouari
arXiv AI
Oct 19

AQUA-Net: Adaptive Frequency Fusion and Illumination Aware Network for Underwater Image Enhancement

AQUA-Net is a lightweight underwater image enhancement model that fuses spatial, frequency, and illumination information through a residual encoder‑decoder architecture with dual auxiliary branches. The frequency fusion encoder incorporates Fourier‑domain cues to preserve textures and details, while the illumination‑aware decoder applies adaptive exposure correction based on a learned illumination map. Experiments on benchmark datasets and a new high‑resolution Mediterranean Sea video set demonstrate that AQUA-Net achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance with fewer parameters, showing strong generalization and robustness for real‑world underwater imaging.

By Munsif Ali, Najmul Hassan, Lucia Ventura, Davide Di Bari, Simonepietro Canese, Jungpil Shin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

LEIQ-Assessor: Multi-dimensional Quality Assessment of Low-light Enhanced Images via Multi-task Learning

Low-light image enhancement algorithms (LIEAs) aim to improve the visibility of images captured under poor illumination. However, the enhancement process often introduces artifacts such as noise amplification, color shift, structural damage, and over-exposure, which degrade the perceptual quality of the enhanced images.