Awesome Low Light Image Enhancement

This is a resource list for low light image enhancement, including datasets, methods/codes/papers, metrics, blogs and so on.

Maintained by: Zhihong Zhang

Looking forward to your sharing! You can come up with your ideas and suggestions in the issue

Introduction

Low light imaging and low light image enhancement have wild applications in our daily life and different scientific research fields, like night surveillance, automated driving, fluorescence microscopy, high speed imaging and so on. However, there is still a long way to go in dealing with these tasks, considering the great challenges in low photon counts, low SNR, complicated noise models, etc. Here, we collect a list of resources related to low light image enhancement, including datasets, methods/codes/papers, metrics, and so on. We hope this can help to provide some help to the development of new methods and solutions to the low light tasks.

Table of Contents

• Highlights
• Datasets
• Review and Benchmark
• Methods
  • Learning-based methods
  • HE-based methods
  • Retinex-based methods
  • Other methods
• Related Works
• Metrics
• Blogs
• Reference

Highlights

🔆 News!

• Papers from CVPR2023 have been updated!

Datasets

Dataset	Brief intro	Website
VIP-LowLight	Eight Natural Images Captured in Very Low-Light Conditions	link
ReNOIR	RENOIR - A Dataset for Real Low-Light Image Noise Reduction	link
Raw Image Low-Light Object	-	link
SID	Learning to see in the dark; light level (outdoor scene 0.2 lux - 5 lux; indoor scene: 0.03 lux - 0.3 lux)	link
ExDARK	Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset	github
MIT-Adobe FiveK	Learning Photographic Global Tonal Adjustment with a Database of Input / Output Image Pairs; (with ~4% low light images)	link
LRAICE-Dataset	A Learning-to-Rank Approach for Image Color Enhancement	-
The 500px Dataset	Exposure: A White-Box Photo Post-Processing Framework	-
DPED	DSLR-quality photos on mobile devices with deep convolutional networks	link
LOL	Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement	link
VV - most challenging cases	Busting image enhancement and tone-mapping algorithms: A collection of the most challenging cases; from Vassilios Vonikakis	link
VV - Phos	A color image database of 15 scenes captured under different illumination conditions; from Vassilios Vonikakis	link
SICE	A large-scale multi-exposure image dataset, which contains 589 elaborately selected high-resolution multi-exposure sequences with 4,413 images	github
The Extended Yale Face Database B	The extended Yale Face Database B contains 16128 images of 28 human subjects under 9 poses and 64 illumination conditions.	link
the nighttime image dataset	A dataset which contains source images in bad visibility and their enhanced images processed by different enhancement algorithms	link
VE-LOL	A large-scale low-light image dataset serving both low/high-level vision with diversified scenes and contents as well as complex degradation in real scenarios, called Vision Enhancement in the LOw-Light condition (VE-LOL).	link
SDSD dataset	Seeing Dynamic Scene in the Dark: High-Quality Video Dataset with Mechatronic Alignment	github
MID	Matching in the Dark: A Dataset for Matching Image Pairs of Low-light Scenes	link
DeepHDRVideo-Dataset	HDR Video Reconstruction: A Coarse-to-fine Network and A Real-world Benchmark Dataset	link
LLVIP	LLVIP: A visible-infrared paired dataset for low-light vision	link
RELLISUR	RELLISUR: A Real Low-Light Image Super-Resolution Dataset	link
LSRW	R2RNet: Low-light Image Enhancement via Real-low to Real-normal Network; 3170 paired images using the Nikon camera and 2480 paired images using the Huawei mobile phone.	github
MCR	Mono-colored raw Paired dataset;  a dataset of colored raw and monochrome raw image pairs, captured with the same exposure setting. Each image has a resolution of 1280×1024. Totally 498 different scenes, each scene has 1 corresponding RGB and Monochrome ground truth and 8 different exposure color Raw inputs.	Google Drive | Baidu Netdisk

Review and Benchmark

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note
2021	IJCV	Benchmarking Low-Light Image Enhancement and Beyond	pdf
2021	IEEE PAMI	Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement Using Deep Learning: A Survey	pdf
2022	ArXiv	Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey and Beyond	pdf code
2023	ArXiv	DarkVision: A Benchmark for Low-Light Image/Video Perception	pdf	DarkVision

Methods

Learning-based methods

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note
2017	ArXiv	MSR-net:Low-light Image Enhancement Using Deep Convolutional Network	pdf	MSR-net
2017	ECCV	Deep Burst Denoising	pdf
2017	VCIP	LLCNN: A convolutional neural network for low-light image enhancement	pdf dataset	LLCNN
2017	Pattern Recognit.	LLNet: A deep autoencoder approach to natural low-light image enhancement	pdf	LLNet
2017	ACM Trans. Graph.	Deep bilateral learning for real-time image enhancement	pdf web code	HDRNet
2017	ICCV	DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks	pdf
2018	BMVC	Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement	pdf web code	Retinex-Net
2018	BMVC	MBLLEN: Low-light Image/Video Enhancement Using CNNs	pdf web code	MBLLEN
2018	Pattern Recognit. Lett.	LightenNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for weakly illuminated image enhancement	pdf	LightenNet
2018	CVPR	Learning to See in the Dark	pdf web code dataset
2018	IEEE TIP	Learning a Deep Single Image Contrast Enhancer from Multi-Exposure Images	pdf code	SICE
2018	ACM TOG	Exposure: A White-Box Photo Post-Processing Framework	pdf code
2018	FG conference	GLADNet: Low-Light Enhancement Network with Global Awareness	pdf web code dataset	GLADNet
2019	IEEE TIP	DeepISP: Towards Learning an End-to-End Image Processing Pipeline	pdf	DeepISP
2019	IEEE TIP	Low-Light Image Enhancement via a Deep Hybrid Network	pdf
2019	IEEE TIP	EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision	code pdf	EnlightenGAN
2019	ACM MM	Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer	pdf code code+	KinD
2019	IEEE Access	A Pipeline Neural Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf
2019	Neurocomputing	Learning Digital Camera Pipeline for Extreme Low-Light Imaging	pdf
2019	CVPR	Underexposed Photo Enhancement Using Deep Illumination Estimation	pdf code	DeepUPE
2019	ICCV	Enhancing Low Light Videos by Exploring High Sensitivity Camera Noise	pdf
2019	ICIP	Enhancement of Weakly Illuminated Images by Deep Fusion Networks	pdf
2019	ICCP	A Bit Too Much? High Speed Imaging from Sparse Photon Counts	pdf
2019	ICIP	Llrnet: A Multiscale Subband Learning Approach for Low Light Image Restoration	pdf	Llrnet
2019	ICIP	Low-Lightgan: Low-Light Enhancement Via Advanced Generative Adversarial Network With Task-Driven Training	pdf	Low-Lightgan
2019	ICME	RDGAN: Retinex Decomposition Based Adversarial Learning for Low-Light Enhancement	code pdf	RDGAN
2019	ICMEW	Low-Light Image Enhancement with Attention and Multi-level Feature Fusion	pdf
2019	PRCV	An Effective Network with ConvLSTM for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf
2019	VISIGRAPP	End-to-End Denoising of Dark Burst Images Using Recurrent Fully Convolutional Networks	pdf
2020	CVPR	Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf web code	Zero-DCE
2020	CVPR	Learning to Restore Low-Light Images via Decomposition-and-Enhancement	pdf
2020	CVPR	From Fidelity to Perceptual Quality: A Semi-Supervised Approach for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf web slides	DRBN
2020	CVPR	DeepLPF: Deep Local Parametric Filters for Image Enhancement	pdf code	DeepLPF
2020	IEEE PAMI	Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time	pdf code	Image-Adaptive-3DLUT
2020	IET Image Proc.	Learning an Adaptive Model for Extreme Low-Light Raw Image Processing	pdf code
2020	ArXiv	Visual Perception Model for Rapid and Adaptive Low-light Image Enhancement	pdf code
2020	ArXiv	Self-supervised Image Enhancement Network: Training with Low Light Images Only	pdf code
2020	ICPR	Unsupervised Real-world Low-light Image Enhancement with Decoupled Networks	pdf
2021	IJCV	Attention Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement with a Large Scale Low-Light Simulation Dataset	pdf code
2021	CVPR	Retinex-Inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf web code	RUAS
2021	CVPR	Deep Denoising of Flash and No-Flash Pairs for Photography in Low-Light Environments	pdf code
2021	CVPR	Extreme Low-Light Environment-Driven Image Denoising over Permanently Shadowed Lunar Regions with a Physical Noise Model	pdf	HORUS
2021	CVPR	Learning Temporal Consistency for Low Light Video Enhancement from Single Images	pdf code
2021	CVPR	Nighttime Visibility Enhancement by Increasing the Dynamic Range and Suppression of Light Effects	pdf
2021	ICCV	Seeing Dynamic Scene in the Dark: A High-Quality Video Dataset with Mechatronic Alignment	pdf code	SDSD
2021	ICCV	HDR Video Reconstruction: A Coarse-to-Fine Network and a Real-World Benchmark Dataset	pdf web code	DeepHDRVideo
2021	ICCV	Matching in the Dark: A Dataset for Matching Image Pairs of Low-Light Scenes	pdf web code	MID
2021	ICCV	Adaptive Unfolding Total Variation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf code	UTVNet
2021	ICCVW	LLVIP: A Visible-Infrared Paired Dataset for Low-Light Vision	pdf code web	LLVIP
2021	JVCIR	R2RNet: Low-Light Image Enhancement via Real-Low to Real-Normal Network	pdf code	R2RNet
2022	CVPR	Toward Fast, Flexible, and Robust Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf code	SCI
2022	CVPR	Deep Color Consistent Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf	DCC-Net
2022	CVPR	URetinex-Net: Retinex-Based Deep Unfolding Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf code	URetinex-Net
2022	CVPR	Day-to-Night Image Synthesis for Training Nighttime Neural ISPs	pdf code
2022	CVPR	SNR-Aware Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf code
2022	CVPR	Dancing Under the Stars: Video Denoising in Starlight	pdf
2022	CVPR	Abandoning the Bayer-Filter To See in the Dark	pdf code
2022	ECCV	Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression	pdf code
2022	ECCV	Deep Fourier-Based Exposure Correction Network with Spatial-Frequency Interaction	pdf code
2022	ECCV	LEDNet: Joint Low-Light Enhancement and Deblurring in the Dark	pdf code	LEDNet
2022	AAAI	Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow	pdf code web	LLFlow
2022	AAAI	DarkVisionNet: Low-Light Imaging via RGB-NIR Fusion with Deep Inconsistency Prior	pdf	DarkVisionNet
2022	ACM MM	ChebyLighter: Optimal Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf code	ChebyLighter
2022	BMCV	You only need 90K parameters to adapt light: a light weight transformer for image enhancement and exposure correction	pdf code	IAT
2022	IJCV	Low-Light Image Enhancement via Breaking down the Darkness	pdf code	Bread
2022	Neurocomputing	Low-Light Image Enhancement with Knowledge Distillation	pdf
2022	Neurocomputing	LSR: Lightening Super-Resolution Deep Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf	LSR
2022	Pattern Recognit.	Brain-like Retinex: A Biologically Plausible Retinex Algorithm for Low Light Image Enhancement	pdf
2022	Pattern Recognit.	LAE-Net: A Locally-Adaptive Embedding Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf	LAE-Net
2022	Knowl-Based Syst	LE-GAN: Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement Network Using Attention Module and Identity Invariant Loss	pdf	LE-GAN
2022	Opt. Lasers Eng.	Infrared and Low-Light Visible Image Fusion Based on Hybrid Multiscale Decomposition and Adaptive Light Adjustment	pdf
2022	Applied Soft Computing	A predictive intelligence approach for low-light enhancement	pdf
2022	IEEE TMM	Purifying Low-light Images via Near-Infrared Enlightened Image	pdf
2022	IEEE TNNLS	DRLIE: Flexible Low-Light Image Enhancement via Disentangled Representations	pdf
2023	Information Fusion	A Mutually Boosting Dual Sensor Computational Camera for High Quality Dark Videography	pdf code	DCMAN
2023	Pattern Recognit.	TreEnhance: A tree search method for low-light image enhancement	pdf code	TreEnhance
2023	AAAI	Ultra-high-definition low-light image enhancement: A benchmark and transformer-based method	pdf code web
2023	AAAI	Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance	pdf code
2023	CVPR	DNF: Decouple and feedback network for seeing in the dark	pdf code	DNF
2023	CVPR	Learning a simple low-light image enhancer from paired low-light instances	pdf code	PairLIE
2023	CVPR	Learning semantic-aware knowledge guidance for low-light image enhancement	pdf code	SKF
2023	CVPR	Low-light image enhancement via structure modeling and guidance	pdf
2023	CVPR	Physics-guided ISO-Dependent sensor noise modeling for extreme low-light photography	pdf code	LLD
2023	CVPR	Visibility constrained wide-band illumination spectrum design for seeing-in-the-dark	pdf code	VCSD

HE-based methods

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note
1990	IEEE TCE	Contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization: speed and effectiveness	pdf	CLAHE
2007	IEEE TCE	Brightness Preserving Dynamic Histogram Equalization for Image Contrast Enhancement	pdf code	BPDHE
2007	IEEE TCE	A Dynamic Histogram Equalization for Image Contrast Enhancement	pdf	DHE
2007	IEEE TCE	Fast Image/Video Contrast Enhancement Based on Weighted Thresholded Histogram Equalization	pdf	WTHE
2011	IEEE TIP	Contextual and Variational Contrast Enhancement	pdf	CVC
2013	IEEE TIP	Contrast enhancement based on layered difference representation of 2D histograms	pdf web	LDR
2013	ICASSP	High efficient contrast enhancement using parametric approximation	pdf	POHE

• See also: link

Retinex-based methods

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note
1997	IEEE TIP	Properties and performance of a center/surround retinex	pdf	SSR
1997	IEEE TIP	A multiscale retinex for bridging the gap between color images and the human observation of scenes	pdf code1 code2	MSRCR
2013	SITIS	Adaptive Multiscale Retinex for Image Contrast Enhancement	code pdf	AMSR
2013	IEEE TIP	Naturalness Preserved Enhancement Algorithm for Non-Uniform Illumination Images	pdf web code	NPE
2015	IEEE TIP	A Probabilistic Method for Image Enhancement With Simultaneous Illumination and Reflectance Estimation	pdf code	SRIE
2016	CVPR	A Weighted Variational Model for Simultaneous Reflectance and Illumination Estimation	pdf code	SRIE
2016	Signal Processing	A fusion-based enhancing method for weakly illuminated images	pdf code	MF
2016	ACM MM	LIME: A Method for Low-light Image Enhancement	pdf web code	LIME
2017	IEEE TIP	LIME: Low-Light Image Enhancement via Illumination Map Estimation	pdf code1 code2 code3	LIME
2017	ICCV	A Joint Intrinsic-Extrinsic Prior Model for Retinex	pdf web code	JieP
2018	IEEE TIP	Structure-Revealing Low-Light Image Enhancement Via Robust Retinex Model	pdf code1 code2
2018	Symmetry	A Smart System for Low-Light Image Enhancement with Color Constancy and Detail Manipulation in Complex Light Environments	pdf
2019	Symmetry	Fractional-Order Fusion Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement	pdf
2019	ICIP	A Hybrid L2 −LP Variational Model For Single Low-Light Image Enhancement With Bright Channel Prior	pdf
2019	IET Image Proc.	Low light image enhancement based on non-uniform illumination prior model	pdf	NIPM
2019	Comput. Graphics Forum	Dual illumination estimation for robust exposure correction	pdf code
2020	ic-ETITE	A comparative analysis of illumination estimation based Image Enhancement techniques	pdf
2020	IEEE TIP	LR3M: Robust Low-Light Enhancement via Low-Rank Regularized Retinex Model	pdf	LR3M
2023	Vis Comput	Illumination estimation for nature preserving low-light image enhancement	pdf	NPLIE

Other methods

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note
2008	IET Image Proc.	Fast centre-surround contrast modification	pdf
2011	ICME	Fast efficient algorithm for enhancement of low lighting video	pdf code
2017	ICCVW	A New Low-Light Image Enhancement Algorithm Using Camera Response Model	pdf code
2017	ArXiv	A Bio-Inspired Multi-Exposure Fusion Framework for Low-light Image Enhancement	pdf code	BIMEF
2017	ICCAIP	A New Image Contrast Enhancement Algorithm Using Exposure Fusion Framework	pdf web code1 code2
2019	IEEE TIP	Low-Light Image Enhancement via the Absorption Light Scattering Model	pdf	ALSM
2019	ICIP	Fast Image Enhancement Based on Maximum and Guided Filters	pdf

Related Works

Year	Pub	Paper	Link	Note	Tag
2012	IST	Improving the robustness in feature detection by local contrast enhancement	dataset
2015	ACM ToG	Automatic Photo Adjustment Using Deep Neural Networks	web code pdf
2018	CVPR	Distort-and-Recover: Color Enhancement using Deep Reinforcement Learning	code pdf
2021	TMM	Recurrent exposure generation for low-light face detection	pdf code	REGDet	face detection
2021	CVPR	HLA-Face: Joint High-Low Adaptation for Low Light Face Detection	web pdf code	HLA-Face	face detection
2021	ICCV	Multitask AET With Orthogonal Tangent Regularity for Dark Object Detection	pdf code	MAET	object detection
2021	ICCV	Photon-Net: Photon-Starved Scene Inference using Single Photon Cameras	pdf code video	Photon-Net	single photon
2021	ICCVW	Single-Stage Face Detection under Extremely Low-Light Conditions	pdf		face detection
2021	ICCVW	DeLiEve-Net: Deblurring Low-Light Images with Light Streaks and Local Events	pdf	DeLiEve-Net	event camera
2022	ArXiv	An Efficient Low-Light Restoration Transformer for Dark Light Field Images		LRT	light field
2022	ICCP	Robust Scene Inference under Noise-Blur Dual Corruptions	pdf code web	Noise-Blur Dual	object detection
2023	IEEE TIP	INFWIDE: Image and feature space wiener deconvolution network for non-blind image deblurring in low-light conditions	pdf code	INFWIDE	deblurring

Metrics

• MSE
• SSIM
• entropy (DE)
• EME
• AB
• PixDist
• LOE

Blogs

Reference

• https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/140926754
• https://github.com/baidut/OpenCE
• https://github.com/tiandaoxiaowu/image-enhancement-about-Retinex