Image Enhancement

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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 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, down 42% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. PHASOR: Anatomy- and Phase-Consistent Volumetric Diffusion for CT Virtual Contrast Enhancement

    Apr 1, 2026Zilong Li, Dongyang Li, Chenglong Ma +6Medical Image SynthesisImage Enhancement

    Z. Li and J. Zhang are with the Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China. · Z. Li, D. Li, D. Jin, H. Luo, and F. Wang are with Alibaba DAMO Academy, China. · C. Ma and H. Shan are with the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China, and also with Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-inspired Technology, Shanghai 201602, China. +1

  2. Towards Controllable Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Continuous Multi-illumination Dataset and Efficient State Space Framework

    Mar 26, 2026Hongru Han, Tingrui Guo, Liming Zhang +3Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau 999078, China · School of Automation, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China · Department of Electromechanical Engineering, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau 999078, China

  3. SIGMA: A Physics-Based Benchmark for Gas Chimney Understanding in Seismic Images

    Mar 24, 2026Bao Truong, Quang Nguyen, Baoru Huang +6Seismic ImagingImage Enhancement

    FPT Software AI Center · University of Liverpool · Imperial College London +2

  4. Cross-Scenario Deraining Adaptation with Unpaired Data: Superpixel Structural Priors and Multi-Stage Pseudo-Rain Synthesis

    Mar 23, 2026Kangbo Zhao, Miaoxin Guan, Xiang Chen +2Image DerainingSynthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation

    School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

  5. Preference-Guided Debiasing for No-Reference Enhancement Image Quality Assessment

    Mar 20, 2026Shiqi Gao, Kang Fu, Zitong Xu +4Image Quality AssessmentDebiased ML

    Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

  6. Unleashing the Power of Simplicity: A Minimalist Strategy for State-of-the-Art Fingerprint Enhancement

    Mar 19, 2026Raffaele CappelliFingerprint IdentificationImage Enhancement

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna, Italy

  7. DST-Net: A Dual-Stream Transformer with Illumination-Independent Feature Guidance and Multi-Scale Spatial Convolution for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Mar 17, 2026Yicui Shi, Yuhan Chen, Xiangfei Huang +3Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

    College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China · Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co.,Ltd., Shanghai, 200125, China

  8. Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections: A New Benchmark and A Novel Pipeline

    Mar 17, 2026Xingyu Liu, Zewei He, Yu Chen +4Diffusion Models for Image RestorationImage Enhancement

    Huanjiang Laboratory, Zhuji, China · School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, Hangzhou, China +1

  9. Advancing Visual Reliability: Color-Accurate Underwater Image Enhancement for Real-Time Underwater Missions

    Mar 17, 2026Yiqiang Zhou, Yifan Chen, Zhe Sun +3Lightweight Neural NetworksImage Enhancement

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, P. R. China · College of Computer and Control Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, 150040, China · College of Future Information Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China +2

  10. Anchor then Polish for Low-light Enhancement

    Mar 16, 2026Tianle Du, Mingjia Li, Hainuo Wang +1Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

    School of Software, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

  11. Low-light Image Enhancement with Retinex Decomposition in Latent Space

    Mar 16, 2026Bolun Zheng, Qingshan Lei, Quan Chen +4Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

    School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China · College of Artificial Intelligence, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing 314001, China · School of Artificial Intelligence at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116000, China +1

  12. Thermal Image Refinement with Depth Estimation using Recurrent Networks for Monocular ORB-SLAM3

    Mar 16, 2026Hürkan Şahin, Huy Xuan Pham, Van Huyen Dang +2Depth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    Automatic Control Group (RAT), Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, Germany · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark, and also with Upteko ApS, Denmark

  13. LoCAtion: Long-time Collaborative Attention Framework for High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction

    Mar 15, 2026Qianyu Zhang, Bolun Zheng, Lingyu Zhu +3HDR Video ReconstructionTemporal Consistency in Video Restoration

    School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China · Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong

  14. MGMAR: Metal-Guided Metal Artifact Reduction for X-ray Computed Tomography

    Mar 13, 2026Hyoung Suk Park, Kiwan JeonComputed TomographyImage Enhancement

    National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Daejeon, 34047, Republic of Korea

  15. Empowering Semantic-Sensitive Underwater Image Enhancement with VLM

    Mar 13, 2026Guodong Fan, Shengning Zhou, Genji Yuan +3Geometry-Guided Image RestorationImage Enhancement

    Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai, China · Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, China · Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China

  16. DINOLight: Robust Ambient Light Normalization with Self-supervised Visual Prior Integration

    Mar 13, 2026Youngjin Oh, Junhyeong Kwon, Nam Ik ChoImage RestorationImage Enhancement

    Department of ECE, INMC, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

  17. Derain-Agent: A Plug-and-Play Agent Framework for Rainy Image Restoration

    Mar 12, 2026Zhaocheng Yu, Xiang Chen, Runzhe Li +4Image DerainingAgent-Based Image Restoration

  18. Enhancing Image Aesthetics with Dual-Conditioned Diffusion Models Guided by Multimodal Perception

    Mar 12, 2026Xinyu Nan, Ning Wang, Yuyao Zhai +1Image EnhancementDiffusion-Based Image Editing

    Peking University, Beijing, China · University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, China

  19. VCR: Variance-Driven Channel Recalibration for Robust Low-Light Enhancement

    Mar 10, 2026Zhixin Cheng, Fangwen Zhang, Xiaotian Yin +2Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

    School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China · Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China · CHN Energy Digital Intelligence Technology Development (Beijing) Co., LTD., Beijing, China

  20. Progressive Split Mamba: Effective State Space Modelling for Image Restoration

    Mar 10, 2026Mohammed Hassanin, Nour Moustafa, Weijian Deng +1Image RestorationVisual SSMs

  21. Spectral-Structured Diffusion for Single-Image Rain Removal

    Mar 10, 2026Yucheng Xing, Xin WangImage DerainingImage Enhancement

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

  22. Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network

    Mar 7, 2026Shixuan Xu, Yabo Liu, Chao Huang +2Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

    State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100. · School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen university, Shenzhen, China.

  23. Pinterest Canvas: Large-Scale Image Generation at Pinterest

    Mar 6, 2026Yu Wang, Eric Tzeng, Raymond Shiau +3Video OutpaintingImage Generation

    Pinterest, Inc. San Francisco, CA, USA

  24. UniRain: Unified Image Deraining with RAG-based Dataset Distillation and Multi-objective Reweighted Optimization

    Mar 4, 2026Qianfeng Yang, Qiyuan Guan, Xiang Chen +3Image DerainingImage Enhancement

    Dalian Polytechnic University · Nanjing University of Science and Technology

  25. Downstream Task Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement: A Perception-Aware Study from Dataset Construction to Network Design

    Mar 2, 2026Bosen Lin, Feng Gao, Yanwei Yu +2Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

    State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39762 USA.

  26. DiffusionXRay: A Diffusion and GAN-Based Approach for Enhancing Digitally Reconstructed Chest Radiographs

    Mar 2, 2026Aryan Goyal, Ashish Mittal, Pranav Rao +2Image EnhancementMedical Image Synthesis

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India · Qure.ai, India

  27. Histopathology Image Normalization via Latent Manifold Compaction

    Feb 27, 2026Xiaolong Zhang, Jianwei Zhang, Selim Sevim +3Computational PathologyDomain Generalization

    Knight Cancer Institute, Oregon Health and Science University, Oregon, USA · Brenden-Colson Center for Pancreatic Care, Oregon Health and Science University, Oregon, USA

  28. LoR-LUT: Learning Compact 3D Lookup Tables via Low-Rank Residuals

    Feb 26, 2026Ziqi Zhao, Abhijit Mishra, Shounak RoychowdhuryImage EnhancementImage Editing

    The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

  29. MASC: Metal-Aware Sampling and Correction via Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated MRI

    Jan 30, 2026Zhengyi Lu, Ming Lu, Chongyu Qu +11Magnetic Resonance ImagingAccelerated MRI Reconstruction

    Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA 37215 · Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA 37232 · Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA 37831

  30. RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenes

    Jan 8, 2026Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang +1Image EnhancementReinforcement Learning

    MediaTek Inc., Taiwan · National Taiwan University, Taiwan · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan