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.
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
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
Raw images inherently suffer from noise due to the stochastic nature of light and sensor hardware imperfections. As real photon counts fall, the ratio of this noise to the signal degrades; consequently, for low-light conditions, robust denoising is especially vital for high-quality results.
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
The paper introduces the Learned Perceptual Image Fusion Measure (LPIFM), a model trained on dense human pairwise comparisons to assess infrared-visible image fusion. LPIFM jointly processes both source images and fused candidates using a shared hierarchical encoder, triadic interaction, and a tie-aware objective, achieving high agreement with human judgments and outperforming 19 conventional metrics. The authors release a large comparison corpus, model weights, and code, demonstrating LPIFM’s rapid adaptability to new fusion-evaluation protocols.
By Haoran Liu, Mingzhe Liu, Peng Li, Guibin Zan