UHD Low-Light Image Enhancement via Real-Time Enhancement Methods with Clifford Information Fusion
Organizations: Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology, China · National University of Defense Technology, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China · School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, China · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, China · the College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, China · Xi’an University, China · Qilu University of Technology, China
Abstract
Considering efficiency, ultra-high-definition (UHD) low-light image restoration is extremely challenging. Existing methods based on Transformer architectures or high-dimensional complex convolutional neural networks often suffer from the "memory wall" bottleneck, failing to achieve millisecond-level inference on edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel real-time UHD low-light enhancement network based on geometric feature fusion using Clifford algebra in 2D Euclidean space. First, we construct a four-layer feature pyramid with gradually increasing resolution, which decomposes input images into low-frequency and high-frequency structural components via a Gaussian blur kernel, and adopts a lightweight U-Net based on depthwise separable convolution for dual-branch feature extraction. Second, to resolve structural information loss and artifacts from traditional high-low frequency feature fusion, we introduce spatially aware Clifford algebra, which maps feature tensors to a multivector space (scalars, vectors, bivectors) and uses Clifford similarity to aggregate features while suppressing noise and preserving textures. In the reconstruction stage, the network outputs adaptive Gamma and Gain maps, which perform physically constrained non-linear brightness adjustment via Retinex theory. Integrated with FP16 mixed-precision computation and dynamic operator fusion, our method achieves millisecond-level inference for 4K/8K images on a single consumer-grade device, while outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on several restoration metrics.
Figures & tables
| Model | Params (M) | Strategy | 4K (3840 2160) | 8K (7680 4320) | ||
| Time (ms) | FPS | Time (ms) | FPS | |||
| LLFormer ( Wang et al., 2023 ) | 24.55 | Native/Patching | 35131.5 | 0.028 | 169990.5 | 0.006 |
| HVI-CIDNet ( Yan et al., 2025 ) | 1.98 | Native/Patching | 456.79 | 2.19 | 1921.65 | 0.52 |
| UHDM ( Yu et al., 2022 ) | 5.93 | Native/Resize 256 | 451.9 | 2.21 | 24.13 | 41.43 |
| Retinexformer ( Cai et al., 2023 ) | 1.61 | Patching | 426.9 | 2.34 | 3037.6 | 0.322 |
| FLOL ( Benito et al., 2025 ) | 0.09 | Native | 109.0 | 9.17 | 421.2 | 2.37 |
| Model | Strategy | Metrics | ||||
| PSNR | SSIM | VIF | LPIPS | NIQE | ||
| Panel A: Evaluation at 4K Resolution (3840 2160) | ||||||
| LLFormer ( Wang et al., 2023 ) | Native | 37.31 | 0.9923 | 0.9036 | 0.0194 | 4.97 |
| HVI-CIDNet ( Yan et al., 2025 ) | Native | 16.44 | 0.8776 | 0.7530 | 0.1702 | 6.78 |
| UHDM ( Yu et al., 2022 ) | Native | 20.12 | 0.8968 | 0.5582 | 0.1428 | 5.39 |
| Retinexformer ( Cai et al., 2023 ) | Native | 15.75 | 0.6851 | 0.6880 | 0.1949 | 4.35 |
| Exp. | Proposed Components | PSNR | SSIM | Params (M) | VRAM (MB) | Latency (ms) | FPS | ||||
| Baseline | Pyramid | Freq-Sep | Illu-Map | Clifford | |||||||
| 1 | ✓ | 21.56 | 0.9212 | 0.434 | 1143.16 | 11.36 | 88.00 | ||||
| 2 | ✓ | ✓ | 21.58 | 0.9313 | 0.572 | 1145.34 | 12.01 | 83.27 | |||
| 3 | ✓ | ✓ | 21.70 | 0.9297 | 0.868 | 768.29 | 12.26 | 81.53 | |||
| 4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 21.61 | 0.9274 | 0.868 | 771.60 | 12.01 | 83.24 | ||
| 5 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 20.89 | 0.9326 | 1.143 | 1156.35 | 13.47 | 74.25 | ||
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | Person | Vehicle | Overall | |||
| Count | Conf. | Count | Conf. | Count | Conf. | |
| Panel A: Evaluation at 4K Resolution (3840 2160) | ||||||
| Input | 427 | 0.7475 | 1655 | 0.7803 | 2082 | 0.7736 |
| LLFormer ( Wang et al., 2023 ) | 507 | 0.7482 | 1789 | 0.7965 | 2296 | 0.7859 |
| Retinexformer ( Cai et al., 2023 ) | 431 | 0.7380 | 1658 | 0.7680 | 2089 | 0.7618 |
| HVI-CIDNet ( Yan et al., 2025 ) | 497 | 0.7486 | 1748 | 0.7969 | 2245 | 0.7862 |
| Trial # | Model-only Inference | End-to-End Latency |
| Panel A: Evaluation on Apple iPhone | ||
| 1 | 146 | 156 |
| 2 | 147 | 159 |
| 3 | 147 | 159 |
| 4 | 142 | 152 |
| 5 | 148 | 159 |
| Model | Illumination Naturalness | Seam Artifacts | Detail Blur | Average |
| Panel A: Evaluation at 4K Resolution ( ) | ||||
| Ours (CPE) | 4.85 | 4.65 | 4.85 | 4.78 |
| LLFormer ( Wang et al., 2023 ) | 4.85 | 4.60 | 4.85 | 4.77 |
| Retinexformer ( Cai et al., 2023 ) | 3.50 | 4.60 | 2.40 | 3.50 |
| Zero-DCE++ ( Li et al., 2021 ) | 2.90 | 4.60 | 4.15 | 3.88 |
| FLOL ( Benito et al., 2025 ) | 4.50 | 4.50 | 4.10 | 4.37 |