Shed Various Lights on a Low-Light Image: Multi-Level Enhancement Guided by Arbitrary References

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network for multi-level low-light image enhancement guided by arbitrary reference images, enabling customizable brightness adjustment while preserving color fidelity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-level enhancement method that uses style transfer principles to allow user-selected brightness references, addressing the subjectivity ignored by prior fixed-brightness approaches.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in enhancement quality.

Effectively preserves color and scene details.

Demonstrates strong adaptability to different brightness references.

Abstract

It is suggested that low-light image enhancement realizes one-to-many mapping since we have different definitions of NORMAL-light given application scenarios or users' aesthetic. However, most existing methods ignore subjectivity of the task, and simply produce one result with fixed brightness. This paper proposes a neural network for multi-level low-light image enhancement, which is user-friendly to meet various requirements by selecting different images as brightness reference. Inspired by style transfer, our method decomposes an image into two low-coupling feature components in the latent space, which allows the concatenation feasibility of the content components from low-light images and the luminance components from reference images. In such a way, the network learns to extract scene-invariant and brightness-specific information from a set of image pairs instead of learning brightness differences. Moreover, information except for the brightness is preserved to the greatest extent to alleviate color distortion. Extensive results show strong capacity and superiority of our network against existing methods.