CRISP: Progressive Illumination Curriculum for Recurrent Low-Light Video Enhancement with Semantic Priors

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is an important image/video processing problem for reliable visual systems under poor illumination, yet it remains challenging due to the strong coupling among insufficient illumination, noise amplification, and structural degradation. Existing methods typically rely on sophisticated network architectures or engineered objective functions. While effective, the former increases model complexity and deployment burden, whereas the latter relies on empirically tuned loss weights. We revisit supervised LLIE from a training-dynamics perspective and observe that brightness-related errors tend to converge early, while residual noise and structural artifacts often remain insufficiently optimized in later stages. To address this issue, we propose a Dynamic Interpolation Training-only Module (DITM), which introduces no additional learnable parameters and adaptively reshapes the model prediction for supervised feed-forward LLIE training. Specifically, DITM employs brightness-aware interpolation, in which the model prediction is combined with a mean brightness-aligned image constructed by rescaling the model prediction according to the mean brightness of the ground-truth image. By reducing the relative dominance of global brightness discrepancy, DITM makes residual local errors more influential during backpropagation after global luminance has largely stabilized, thereby facilitating artifact suppression and fine-detail restoration in later training stages. DITM is used only during training and is fully removed at inference, introducing no additional inference cost. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and CNN-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based LLIE backbones show that DITM consistently improves fidelity and perceptual quality while preserving the inference-time architecture and introducing no additional inference-time computation.

Most sRGB-based LLIE methods suffer from entangled luminance and color, while the HSV color space offers insufficient decoupling at the cost of introducing significant red and black noise artifacts. Recently, the HVI color space has been proposed to address these limitations by enhancing color fidelity through chrominance polarization and intensity compression. However, existing methods could suffer from channel-level inconsistency between luminance and chrominance, and misaligned color distribution may lead to unnatural enhancement results. To address these challenges, we propose the Variance-Driven Channel Recalibration for Robust Low-Light Enhancement (VCR), a novel framework for low-light image enhancement. VCR consists of two main components, including the Channel Adaptive Adjustment (CAA) module, which employs variance-guided feature filtering to enhance the model's focus on regions with high intensity and color distribution. And the Color Distribution Alignment (CDA) module, which enforces distribution alignment in the color feature space. These designs enhance perceptual quality under low-light conditions. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing methods.

Low-light images often suffer from low contrast, noise, and color distortion, degrading visual quality and impairing downstream vision tasks. We propose a novel conditional diffusion framework for low-light image enhancement that incorporates a Structured Control Embedding Module (SCEM). SCEM decomposes a low-light image into four informative components including illumination, illumination-invariant features, shadow priors, and color-invariant cues. These components serve as control signals that condition a U-Net-based diffusion model trained with a simplified noise-prediction loss. Thus, the proposed SCEM equipped Diffusion method enforces structured enhancement guided by physical priors. In experiments, our model is trained only on the LOLv1 dataset and evaluated without fine-tuning on LOLv2-real, LSRW, DICM, MEF, and LIME. The method achieves state-of-the-art performance in quantitative and perceptual metrics, demonstrating strong generalization across benchmarks. https://casted.github.io/scem/.