Low-Light Object Detection

Low-light conditions reduce visible contrast and obscure details, while infrared images lack color and texture, motivating the fusion of infrared and visible information for visual tasks. Existing fusion methods primarily optimize image appearance or task-specific features without explicitly disentangling the coupled factors underlying thermal observations, limiting their physical interpretation under thermal degeneracy. Hyperspectral thermal measurements enable physical decomposition, but they require specialized imaging hardware, while pixel-level physical annotations for supervision or evaluation incur additional costs. We propose TeX-Gen, a physically guided framework for TeX generation from paired visible and infrared images in low-light visual tasks. TeX Generation constructs complementary multi-view features and employs independent branch-specific gates to route cues into the Temperature, Emissivity, and Texture maps. TeXMetric integrates radiometric reconstruction, channel structure, and material consistency to assess the generated maps without requiring pixel-level physical labels. TeX Tune improves performance through task-guided adjustments, jointly optimizing the adjustment modules and task network while keeping the generator frozen. Experiments show that TeX-Gen achieves competitive task performance in low-light environments on the FLIR, LLVIP, M3FD, and MSRS datasets. Experiments on HADAR also examine the association between TeXMetric scores and downstream detection performance.

Existing RAW-based detectors typically introduce learnable ISP modules to convert RAW inputs into sRGB-like formats to fit off-the-shelf detectors. However, this RAW-to-sRGB paradigm decouples representation learning from the downstream detection task. Crucially, it forces the network to inherit human-centric visual priors while discarding intrinsic RAW advantages, such as linear sensor responses and high-bit-depth, minimally processed scene cues. In this paper, we propose ILLRAW, an ILLumination-aware end-to-end RAW object detection framework. Instead of reconstructing visually plausible sRGB images, ILLRAW directly learns detection-oriented RAW features through a lightweight feature adapter inserted at the input stage of existing detectors. ILLRAW estimates an illumination mask and introduces channel-sensitive embeddings to model Bayer-channel responses. These features are fused by an illumination attention fusion module. Experiments show clear improvements on the diverse AODRaw benchmark and competitive performance on LOD and PascalRAW, with particularly strong results under dark exposure.

VRU detection in low-light conditions is a key component in ensuring VRU safety during the most collision prone time of the day. Currently, advances in low-light detection are limited due to the lack of large scale datasets and automated labeling methods. Most autolabeling methods use RGB detections as their labels source, which cannot be replicated in low-light conditions. To fill this gap in this paper we present an automated pipeline for low-light VRU labeling. We use LWIR-RGB image pairs and source our labels from LWIR as VRUs differentiate from the background due to their body temperature. Unlike our previous work that relied on a complex hardware setup to align the two modalities, we perform this experiment using a LWIR-RGB stereo setup, lowering hardware complexity and cost, making the pipeline easier to reproduce. We evaluate method end-to-end on a dataset collected in the capital region of Finland. Models trained on our generated labels beat both off-the-shelf baselines and models fine tuned on a hand labeled subset on F1, mAP@50 and LAMR metrics when tested on a manually labeled dataset, and the result holds for two different LWIR detectors. This shows that low-light VRU autolabeling can be made both accessible and effective without specialized alignment hardware.

Low-light UAV-based RGB-infrared oriented small-vehicle detection is important for nighttime traffic monitoring, emergency response, and urban inspection. Illumination variations, headlight glare, local shadows, and thermal-response degradation cause spatially varying modality reliability, while the small visual extent of vehicles further weakens boundaries, orientation cues, and thermal responses. Accordingly, selecting trustworthy observations based on local modality reliability while further exploiting complementary discriminative information in regions with ambiguous modality preference is key to constructing effective multimodal representations. Based on this insight, we propose ReDiffNet, a reliability-conditioned differential representation network in which modality reliability guides both evidence selection and complementary recovery. Specifically, degradation-aware reliability learning estimates relative spatial reliability, uncertainty-guided differential recovery exploits cross-modal differences to recover complementary cues in ambiguous regions, and reliability-conditioned reconstruction integrates retained and recovered evidence into a unified representation. ReDiffNet achieves 85.3% and 73.9% mAP50 on DroneVehicle and VEDAI, respectively, supporting its effectiveness.

Severe image degradation under low-light nighttime conditions constitutes a core bottleneck preventing all-day applications for UAV-based single object tracking. Existing image enhancement methods often struggle to distinguish between target and background regions, which can easily lead to amplified background noise or compromise target features. To overcome this limitation, we propose TAE, a target-aware low-light enhancement framework tailored for nighttime object tracking. Guided explicitly by weak supervisory signals from tracking bounding boxes, the framework performs region-aware enhancement to ensure operations focus on the target area. It further adopts an adaptive RGB multi-curve fusion mechanism to achieve refined modeling and adaptive adjustment across different regions. To facilitate research in this domain, we also contribute DarkSOT, a new benchmark for nighttime UAV tracking, comprising 268 sequences across 9 target categories. Experimental results on the DarkSOT and UAVDark135 demonstrate that TAE significantly improves tracking performance in low-light nighttime scenarios, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization. The DarkSOT dataset is available at https://github.com/Fu0511/DarkSOT-Dataset.

Detecting objects reliably under extreme low-light conditions is an open problem in computer vision, with practical urgency in applications ranging from nighttime surveillance to search-and-rescue robotics. Conventional RGB cameras degrade sharply at low photon flux, while event cameras which record asynchronous per-pixel brightness changes at microsecond resolution and high dynamic range provide complementary structural cues that are largely illumination-invariant. We present AdaFuse-Det, a dual-stream framework that fuses CLAHE-enhanced RGB frames with voxelized event tensors through an Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion (ACMF) module grounded in minimum-variance linear estimation theory. We formally show that the learned attention map asymptotically recovers the Gauss-Markov optimal fusion weights, and establish event conservation and temporal resolution bounds for the voxelization stage. On the LLE-VOS benchmark, AdaFuse-Det achieves a Recall of $65.54\%$, Precision of $53.85\%$, and F1-Score of $59.12\%$ under severe illumination degradation, outperforming single-modality detectors in recall by a margin that reflects the theoretically predicted illumination-adaptation behavior.

Real-world deployment of AI vision models is both fueled and limited by the data available for training and testing. Real datasets are sparse and uneven: long-tailed or unbalanced distributions hinder generalization, and the low number of samples in low density regions makes it hard to run evaluations. Synthetic data can fill these gaps, providing us with a way to sample the input space more continuously and improve data coverage for benchmarks. Focusing on the autonomous driving safety-critical case of pedestrian detection in the dark, we show how synthetic low-light samples can be used to better characterize the performance of a state-of-the-art object detection model as a function of the scene illumination. We use a synthetic RAW image augmentation technique to generate low-light samples that match the noise model of the camera sensor. Performance metrics on real and synthetic low-light data are similar, indicating that the AI model finds it hard to distinguish between them.

In multimedia application scenarios, images captured under low-illumination conditions often lead to lower accuracy in visual perception tasks compared to those taken in well-lit environments. To tackle this challenge, we propose AMIEOD, an image enhancement-enabled object detection framework for low-illumination scenes, where the two tasks are jointly optimized in a detection performance-oriented manner. Specifically, to fully exploit the information in poorly lit images, a Multi-Experts Image Enhancement Module (MEIEM) is proposed, which leverages diverse enhancement strategies. On this basis, aiming to better align the MEIEM with the detection task, we propose a Detection-Guided Regression Loss (DGRL) that utilizes the detection result to decide the regression target. Moreover, to dynamically select the most suitable enhancement strategy from MEIEM during inference, we construct an Expert Selection Module (ESM) guided by the proposed Detection-Guided Cross-Entropy (DGCE) loss, which formulates the optimization of ESM as a classification task. The improved method is well-matched with current detection algorithms to improve their performance in dim scenes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves object detection accuracy in low-illumination conditions. Our code has been released at https://github.com/scujayfantasy/AMIEOD

Illumination using correlated photon sources has been established as an approach to allowing high-fidelity images to be reconstructed from noisy camera frames by taking advantage of the knowledge that signal photons are spatially correlated whereas detector clicks due to noise are uncorrelated. However, in computer-vision tasks, the goal is often not ultimately to reconstruct an image, but to make inferences about a scene -- such as what object is present. Here we show how correlated-photon illumination can be used to gain an advantage in a hybrid optical-electronic computer-vision pipeline for object recognition. We demonstrate correlation-aware training (CAT): end-to-end optimization of a trainable correlated-photon illumination source and a Transformer backend in a way that the Transformer can learn to benefit from the correlations, using a small number (<= 100) of shots. We show a classification accuracy enhancement of up to 15 percentage points over conventional, uncorrelated-illumination-based computer vision in ultra-low-light and noisy imaging conditions, as well as an improvement over using untrained correlated-photon illumination. Our work illustrates how specializing to a computer-vision task -- object recognition -- and training the pattern of photon correlations in conjunction with a digital backend allows us to push the limits of accuracy in highly photon-budget-constrained scenarios beyond existing methods focused on image reconstruction.