Consist-Retinex: One-Step Noise-Emphasized Consistency Training Accelerates High-Quality Retinex Enhancement

TL;DR

Consist-Retinex introduces a one-step low-light image enhancement method combining a Retinex transformer decomposition with dual consistency models, achieving high-quality results efficiently.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Retinex-aware training framework with adaptive noise emphasis and a dual objective, enabling stable one-step enhancement.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on VE-LOL-L scores under one-step inference.

Maintains competitive performance on the LOL benchmark.

Reduces training and sampling costs significantly.

Abstract

Retinex-based low-light image enhancement benefits from separating reflectance and illumination, yet recent generative approaches often rely on iterative sampling and are difficult to deploy under strict latency budgets. Consistency models offer a natural route to one-step restoration, but direct adaptation to Retinex-factorized enhancement is unstable: one-step inference is evaluated at the high-noise endpoint, whereas standard training schedules provide little supervision there, and temporal self-consistency alone does not determine the correct conditional target. We propose Consist-Retinex, which first uses a Retinex Transformer Decomposition Network (TDN) to obtain paired reflectance and illumination maps, then trains two conditional consistency models with a Retinex-aware dual objective and adaptive noise-emphasized fixed-point sampling. The dual objective combines trajectory consistency with paired ground-truth component alignment, while the sampling rule concentrates supervision near the inference endpoint without discarding full-range noise coverage. We further provide an endpoint error bound, an anchoring-propagation result, and a high-noise sample-allocation analysis that explain why endpoint supervision and temporal consistency are complementary for one-step Retinex enhancement. Experiments on paired and unpaired low-light benchmarks show that Consist-Retinex obtains the best VE-LOL-L scores among the compared methods under one-step inference and remains competitive on LOL, with substantially reduced sampling and consistency-stage training cost in the reported setup.