Overview

Image enhancement studies how to improve images affected by low light, poor exposure, haze, rain, noise, compression, or limited dynamic range, while retaining useful detail for people and vision systems. Common approaches include Retinex decomposition and tone curves, convolutional and transformer networks, state-space models, lookup tables, physical priors, and diffusion-based restoration; training may use paired data, unpaired data, or test-time adaptation. Methods are evaluated on task-specific benchmarks such as LOL for low-light images, UIEB for underwater enhancement, and MIT-Adobe FiveK for retouching, alongside real-world tests and downstream tasks like detection or segmentation. A central tension is improving brightness and perceptual appeal without distorting color, erasing structure, or inventing details, while also generalizing across cameras and scenes at practical speeds.

Latest papers

CardsList

156 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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

    Oct 30, 2026Qiyi Xie, Wei Chen Ng, Ziyao Li +4Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  2. Beyond CCT: Multi-channel SPD recovery for per-shot camera color correction

    Oct 29, 2026Shuwei Yue, Hongke Wei, Qiao ChenColor ConstancyImage Enhancement

  3. WaFIR: Wavelet-Fourier Mixture-of-Experts with Subband-Adaptive Routing for Blind All-in-One Image Restoration

    Oct 21, 2026Trong Nhan Nguyen, Vu Hoang Minh Doan, Thanh Dat Le +6Image DerainingImage Restoration

  4. Unified RAW Image Exposure Correction and Restoration via Linear Illumination and Frequency-Adaptive Enhancement

    Oct 20, 2026Yingkai Zhang, Yunhao Zou, Ying FuImage EnhancementImage Restoration

  5. MESS: Multi-Exposure Sequence Synthesis for Generalizable Image Enhancement

    Oct 17, 2026Ruodai Cui, Shuaizheng Liu, Rongyuan Wu +1Image EnhancementSynthetic Data Augmentation

  6. Dynamic Interpolation for Training-Time Prediction Reshaping in Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Oct 13, 2026Peirui Zhu, Shijie Hao, Jingxi Liao +2Low-Light Image EnhancementImage Enhancement

  7. Contrast Enhancement or Noise Reduction? On Improving Cervical Cancer Classification

    Oct 8, 2026Ach Khozaimi, Ulfatun NahdhiyahMedical Image ClassificationImage Enhancement

  8. VoxelSynth3D: Interpretable Volumetric Image-Domain Metal Artifact Reduction with a Paired Synthetic CLINIC Benchmark

    Oct 1, 2026Amritesh Banerjee, Abdul Basit, Renil Renji Joseph +2Image EnhancementImage Reconstruction

  9. Pixel-wise Exposure for Highly Robust In-Vehicle Remote-PPG

    Sep 29, 2026Jieying Wang, Xinqi Cai, Caifeng Shan +1Remote PhotoplethysmographyImage Enhancement

  10. Domain-adaptive Zero-Shot Image Enhancement via Locality-Constrained Diffusion Guidance

    Sep 28, 2026Theresa Neubauer, Dimitrios Lenis, Astrid Berg +7Diffusion Model GuidanceImage Enhancement

  11. Physics-Guided Spectral Distillation for Underwater Image Enhancement on Resource-Constrained Devices

    Sep 28, 2026Yifan Chen, Kai He, Ye Zheng +3Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

  12. Anguinus Sculpturae: Compositional Synthesis of Peak-Enhancement Breast DCE-MRI Scans

    Sep 27, 2026Benjamin Hamm, Nico Albert Disch, Maximilian Rokuss +3Image EnhancementConditional Image Generation

  13. LoopLUT: 3D Lookup Tables with Progressive Region Refinement for Real-Time 4K Image Enhancement

    Sep 27, 2026Yang Ye, Jiajun Ma, Chen Wu +5Image Enhancement

  14. PIC-UIE: Predicting Image-Adaptive Corrections for Lightweight Underwater Image Enhancement

    Sep 27, 2026Cunhao Zhu, Dongliang Xu, Xiangtao Kong +3Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

  15. SEE Challenge 2026: Event-Guided Brightness Adjustment Across a Broad Illumination Range

    Sep 24, 2026Yunfan Lu, Mingchao Xu, Hanyu Zhou +9Image EnhancementHDR Imaging

  16. Lesion-Gated Hybrid Synthesis for Virtual Contrast-Enhanced Breast MRI: A MAMA-SYNTH Challenge Solution

    Sep 18, 2026Shohei YoshimotoMedical Image SynthesisImage Enhancement

  17. Adaptive Color Grading

    Sep 18, 2026Trevor D. Canham, Abhijith Punnappurath, Michael S. BrownImage EditingImage Enhancement

  18. Visual Autoregressive Priors for RAW-to-sRGB Image Signal Processing

    Sep 16, 2026Tailai Chen, Xiaotong Luo, Yuan Gao +2Image Enhancement

  19. SyntheticDoc: A Large Synthetic Dataset for Document Unwarping and Illumination Correction

    Sep 14, 2026Daniel Woortmann, Tanguy Magne, Olga Sorkine-HornungImage EnhancementSynthetic Data Generation

  20. Fine-Grained Anomaly Perception in Wild UGC-Enhanced Images: A Comprehensive Dataset and Difference-Fusion Framework

    Sep 2, 2026Yan Zhong, Gefei Chen, Qiufang Ma +4Anomaly LocalizationImage Quality Assessment

  21. Dotting the Eye: An Intent-Driven Image Retouching Agent for Visual Focus Enhancement

    Sep 1, 2026Chujie Qin, Zilong Zhang, Zewei Chang +5Image EnhancementVisual Saliency

  22. StainPresetNet: Stain Preset Network for Fast Multi-to-Multi Stain Normalization

    Sep 1, 2026Hongtao Kang, Die Luo, Li Chen +4Computational PathologyImage Enhancement

  23. Real-Time Scene-Adaptive Tone Mapping for High-Dynamic Range Object Detection

    Aug 31, 2026Gongzhe Li, Linwei Qiu, Peibei Cao +3Image EnhancementHDR Imaging

  24. DARD: Zero-Shot Degradation-Aware Retinex-Guided Diffusion for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Aug 29, 2026Wenjie Cai, Yuezhe Yang, Jianyang Xia +2Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  25. Mapping-Based Image Diffusion

    Aug 29, 2026Freddie Åström, Michael Felsberg, George BaravdishImage DenoisingImage Enhancement

  26. Di2^2CycleSB: Towards High-Quality Unsupervised Nighttime Visibility Enhancement via Schrödinger Bridge Transformer

    Aug 29, 2026Hanting Li, Xin Sun, Wei Ye +2Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  27. Efficient JPEG Restoration in the Wavelet Domain via Mean Flows

    Aug 28, 2026Stefan-Alexandru Asandei, Mihai-Alexandru RaduImage RestorationImage Enhancement

  28. Enhancing MRI Brain Tumor Edge Detection: A Hybrid Preprocessing Approach Utilizing CLAHE

    Aug 27, 2026Shahid-E-Kaiser Md. Tashrif, Munshi Md Arafat Hussain, Sheikh Nahian +1Medical Image AnalysisMagnetic Resonance Imaging