PDE: Gene Effect Inspired Parameter Dynamic Evolution for Low-light Image Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces PDE, a biologically inspired parameter evolution method, to dynamically adapt neural network parameters for low-light image enhancement, addressing the gene effect that hampers model performance.

Contribution

We propose PDE, a novel parameter dynamic evolution approach inspired by biological evolution, to mitigate the gene effect in low-light image enhancement models.

Findings

PDE improves enhancement performance across various images.

Parameter dynamic evolution effectively mitigates the gene effect.

Experimental results validate the superiority of PDE over static models.

Abstract

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental task in computational photography, aiming to improve illumination, reduce noise, and enhance image quality. While recent advancements focus on designing increasingly complex neural network models, we observe a peculiar phenomenon: resetting certain parameters to random values unexpectedly improves enhancement performance for some images. Drawing inspiration from biological genes, we term this phenomenon the gene effect. The gene effect limits enhancement performance, as even random parameters can sometimes outperform learned ones, preventing models from fully utilizing their capacity. In this paper, we investigate the reason and propose a solution. Based on our observations, we attribute the gene effect to static parameters, analogous to how fixed genetic configurations become maladaptive when environments change. Inspired by biological evolution, where adaptation to new environments relies on gene mutation and recombination, we propose parameter dynamic evolution (PDE) to adapt to different images and mitigate the gene effect. PDE employs a parameter orthogonal generation technique and the corresponding generated parameters to simulate gene recombination and gene mutation, separately. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our techniques. The code will be released to the public.