Low-Light Image Enhancement

Overview

Low-light image enhancement studies how to recover brightness, color, and structure from images whose weak signals are corrupted by sensor noise, blur, and uneven illumination. Methods commonly use Retinex-style illumination and reflectance decomposition, learned curves, color-space or frequency decoupling, and CNNs, Transformers, state-space models, diffusion, or flow-based restoration guided by physical priors. Training ranges from paired supervision on benchmarks such as LOL, SID, and LSRW to unpaired or zero-reference learning; events, RAW data, bursts, and auxiliary depth or semantic cues can provide additional information, while some systems optimize for detection or segmentation rather than appearance alone. Key challenges are generalizing from synthetic or paired data to diverse real scenes, balancing naturalness and color fidelity against pixel metrics, and delivering efficient, controllable enhancement without amplifying noise or erasing detail.

Latest papers

CardsList

98 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 175% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. 3L-D: A Low-Light Level Dataset from a Sensor-Agnostic, Alignment-Preserving Acquisition Framework

    Nov 2, 2026Léo Rueff, Maurgène Ghezal, Valentin Gorse +4Low-Light Image Enhancement

  2. 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

  3. Bidirectional Cross-frequency Domain Interaction Network for UHD Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Oct 24, 2026Bo Fu, Hai Chi, Liyan Wang +5Low-Light Image EnhancementFrequency-Domain Image Processing

  4. Unifying Amplitude-Phase Coupling and Reliable Endogenous Priors for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Oct 17, 2026Tongshun Zhang, Zixuan Zhong, Pingping Liu +4Low-Light Image EnhancementImage Restoration

  5. Stabilizing Illumination Conditioning in SSM-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement with Bottleneck Prompt Sidecars

    Oct 16, 2026Wei Chen Ng, Qiyi Xie, Jian Ding Tan +3Low-Light Image EnhancementImage Restoration

  6. When Should a Low-Light Pipeline Generate? Auditable Risk Control for Selective Generative Enhancement

    Oct 15, 2026Qiyi Xie, Wei Chen Ng, Suyang Xi +5Low-Light Image Enhancement

  7. OLiVES: An Outdoor Low-Light Video Benchmark for Enhancement and Segmentation

    Oct 14, 2026Yini Li, Joanne Lin, David Blackham +2Low-Light Image EnhancementVideo Object Segmentation

  8. 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

  9. IDM-Net: A Lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Sep 25, 2026Cheng-Yen Hsiao, Jing-Ming GuoLow-Light Image Enhancement

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

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

  11. MirrorDistill: Illumination-Aware Latent Distillation for Efficient Low-Light Restoration

    Sep 21, 2026Farida Mohsen, Tala Zaim, Nurul Izni Rusli +3Low-Light Image EnhancementImage Restoration

  12. NOVA-GS: Noise-Aware View-Consistent Gaussian Splatting for Low-Light Novel View Synthesis

    Sep 11, 2026Shaurya Pavan A, Vemunuri Divya Madhuri, Yash Pradeep Gawande +1Multi-View Consistency3D Gaussian Splatting

  13. P-PatchDiff: Progressive Patch Diffusion Models for Low-light Image Enhancement

    Sep 1, 2026Ruoyu Guo, Haonan Zhong, Maurice Pagnucco +1Diffusion Models for Image RestorationLow-Light Image Enhancement

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. Bridge Damage Detection from Low-Light UAV Imagery via Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Enhancement

    Aug 24, 2026Hu Wang, Hongxu Pu, Zhiqi Hu +2Image RestorationLow-Light Image Enhancement

  17. BC-IHV: Conditioning the Color Space for Stable Rectified-Flow Low-Light Enhancement

    Aug 22, 2026Yi Ai, Zheng Chen, Yuanhao Cai +2Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  18. AutoLumNet: Monotone Optimal Transport for Single-Shot Exposure Correction

    Aug 20, 2026Airin Akter Tania, Md Raihan Khan, Mohiuddin AhmadImage EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  19. Bright-Channel Retinex Enhancement with a Conditional Overdispered-Noise Analysis

    Aug 10, 2026Jongpil JeongImage EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  20. Retrieval-Augmented Generation-Based Color Restoration for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Aug 8, 2026Li-Wei Lu, Shaou-Gang MiaouLow-Light Image EnhancementImage Restoration

  21. Learning Structural Illumination for Unsupervised Low-light Enhancement

    Aug 8, 2026Tianle Du, Peiyuan He, Hainuo Wang +2Low-Light Image Enhancement

  22. Overcoming Attention Drift: Homogeneity-Heterogeneity Guided Feature Aggregation for Low-Light Remote Sensing Image Enhancement

    Aug 6, 2026Yaozi Zhong, Xingxing Yang, Shaohui Mei +1Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  23. UBLLIE: Unified Backlight and Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Aug 5, 2026Yasmin Yasin, Muhammad Usman, Ibrahim Radwan +1Image EnhancementLow-Light Image Enhancement

  24. Beyond Illumination: A Conditional Mutual Information-Guided Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

    Aug 3, 2026Ya-nan Guan, Shaonan Zhang, Tao Dai +5Low-Light Image Enhancement