LUMINA-26: Low-Light Understanding for Modeling and Interpreting Night-time Actions
Authors: Aman Kumar Pandey, Anil Singh Parihar
Organizations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India · Department of Computer Science, Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, University of Delhi, Delhi, India
Low-light human action recognition remains a challenging problem due to poor illumination, amplified noise, motion ambiguity, and diverse real-world scenes. Existing low-light datasets often lack sufficient action diversity, capture realism, or balanced class distribution, limiting the development of robust models. To address this, we introduce LUMINA-26: Low-Light Understanding for Modeling and Interpreting Night-time Actions, comprising 6,784 clips across 26 action classes, recorded from 22 subjects across 20 indoor and outdoor locations under naturally occurring low-light conditions. We also propose Illumi-Net: An Illumination-Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts Network, which leverages video-level illumination cues to guide adaptive enhancement and transformer-based spatio-temporal feature extraction, with expert-conditioned decision fusion. Our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance on ELLAR (Top-1: 55.13%, Top-5: 78.87%) and establishes a strong baseline on LUMINA-26 (Top-1: 75.95%, Top-5: 93.58%), offering a practical benchmark for future low-light action recognition research.
Accurate text recognition in low-light environments is essential for intelligent systems in applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart surveillance. However, challenges such as poor illumination and noise interference remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce LSTR, a large-scale Low-light Scene Text Recognition dataset comprising 11,273 low-light images generated from well-lit datasets (ICDAR2015, IIIT5K, and WordArt), along with ESTR, which includes 60 real nighttime street-scene images in English and Spanish for exclusive evaluation. We explore two solution strategies: (1) employing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models with fine-tuning and LoRA-based fine-tuning and (2) a joint training strategy that integrates a low-light image enhancement (LLIE) module with an OCR model. In particular, we propose a novel re-render LLIE (RLLIE) module, which demonstrates improved performance on real-world data. Through extensive experimentation, we analyze various training strategies and address a key research question: \emph{How bright is bright enough for effective scene text recognition?} Our results indicate that standalone LLIE or OCR models perform inadequately under low-light conditions, highlighting the advantages of specialized, jointly trained text-centric approaches. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive benchmark to support future research in robust low-light scene text recognition. https://huggingface.co/datasets/lumimusta/Low-light_Scene_Text_Dataset.
Human Action Recognition (HAR) is a fundamental computer vision task with diverse real-world applications. Practical deployments often involve low-light environments and unconstrained 6-DoF camera motion, conditions that degrade visual quality, disrupt temporal coherence, and compromise reliability of existing methods. Event cameras, with high low-light sensitivity and microsecond-level temporal resolution, paired with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), present a promising solution. However, current research faces two key challenges: absence of a benchmark integrating low-light conditions, 6-DoF motion, and synchronized IMU data; and lack of effective motion compensation techniques. To address these, we propose Event-IMU Stabilized HAR (EIS-HAR), with two modules. The first is an EIS module that reduces motion blur via a non-linear warping function to reconstruct a motion-compensated input. The second is a HAR module with a four-stage hybrid architecture to efficiently extract spatiotemporal features for accurate action recognition. To alleviate data scarcity, we introduce DarkShake-DVS, the first large-scale event-based HAR benchmark that includes 18,041 realworld clips captured in low light and intense 6-DoF motion, supplemented by synchronized IMU data. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate consistent superiority of EIS-HAR over state-of-the-art methods.
This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge. The objective of the competition was to merge a set of misaligned smartphone images in the raw domain, captured in low-light conditions, into a single, clean image. Introduced setup simultaneously addresses two problems of low-light photography: visual degradations such as high noise and mixed scene illuminants, and the geometric inconsistencies caused by hand movement during multi-frame capture. To advance research in low-light and nighttime computational photography, a challenging dataset was collected comprising 585 real-world scenes, spanning indoor low-light and outdoor nighttime conditions, for training and benchmarking participant solutions. The competition employed a three-stage evaluation protocol: automatic validation via the CodaBench platform in stages one and two, followed by blind assessment on a private test set for the final ranking. Ten teams surpassed the established baseline, achieving improvements of up to +6.49 dB in PSNR and +0.0101 in SSIM, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art performance for burst-based low-light image enhancement. These results demonstrate significant progress in handling real-world noise, motion, and illumination variability in the low-light setting. Comprehensive results, leaderboards, and additional information are publicly available at https://nightimaging.org.