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Awesome Low Light Image Enhancement

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

Looking forward to your sharing! You can come up with your ideas and suggestions in the issue or directly pull request.

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

🔆 News!

  • Papers from ICCV2023 have been updated!

Datasets

Dataset Brief intro Website
SID Learning to see in the dark ;
contains 5094 raw shortexposure images, each with a corresponding long-exposure reference image (illuminance level: outdoor scene 0.2 lux - 5 lux; indoor scene: 0.03 lux - 0.3 lux)
link
ExDARK A collection of 7,363 low-light images from very low-light environments to twilight (i.e 10 different conditions) with 12 object classes (similar to PASCAL VOC) annotated on both image class level and local object bounding boxes. github
LOL Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement link
SICE A large-scale multi-exposure image dataset, which contains 589 elaborately selected high-resolution multi-exposure sequences with 4,413 images github
MIT-Adobe FiveK Learning Photographic Global Tonal Adjustment;
a dataset consisting of 5,000 photographs, with both the original RAW images straight from the camera and adjusted versions by 5 trained photographers
link
DID A high-quality low-light video dataset with multiple exposures and cameras link
DPED DSLR-quality photos on mobile devices with deep convolutional networks link
VIP-LowLight Eight Natural Images Captured in Very Low-Light Conditions link
ReNOIR RENOIR - A Dataset for Real Low-Light Image Noise Reduction link
LLIV-Phone The images and videos are taken by various phones' cameras under diverse illumination conditions and scenes link
TM-DIED 222 JPEG photos constituting some of the most challenging cases for image enhancement and tone-mapping algorithms link
DRV 202 paired raw low-light image Dataset link
LIME A small amount of unpaired images for testing. link
VV - Phos A color image database of 15 scenes captured under different illumination conditions link
The 500px Dataset Exposure: A White-Box Photo Post-Processing Framework -
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 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 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
Raw Image Low-Light Object - link
LRAICE A Learning-to-Rank Approach for Image Color Enhancement -
LOM dataset A paired low-light & over-exposure & normal-light multi-view dataset (for NeRF under low-light conditions) 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
2023 Signal Process. A comprehensive experiment-based review of low-light image enhancement methods and benchmarking low-light image quality assessment pdf

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 Semantically contrastive learning for low-light image enhancement pdf code web SCL-LLE
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
2022 IEEE TCSVT EFINet: Restoration for Low-Light Images via Enhancement-Fusion Iterative Network pdf code EFINet
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
2023 AAAI Polarization-Aware Low-Light Image Enhancement 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
2023 IEEE TMM Glow in the Dark: Low-Light Image Enhancement with External Memory pdf code EMNet
2023 Mach. Vision Appl. LDNet: low-light image enhancement with joint lighting and denoising pdf LDNet
2023 IEEE TPAMI Learning With Nested Scene Modeling and Cooperative Architecture Search for Low-Light Vision pdf code RUAS
2023 IEEE TIP TSDN: Two-Stage Raw Denoising in the Dark pdf TSDN
2023 IEEE TIP Unsupervised Low-Light Video Enhancement with Spatial-Temporal Co-attention Transformer pdf LightenFormer
2023 IEEE TCYB Deep Perceptual Image Enhancement Network for Exposure Restoration pdf DPIENet
2023 SIGGRAPH ASIA Low-light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models pdf code DiffLL
2023 ACM MM CLE Diffusion: Controllable Light Enhancement Diffusion Model pdf code web CLE Diffusion
2023 ACM MM FourLLIE: Boosting Low-Light Image Enhancement by Fourier Frequency Information pdf code FourLLIE
2023 Pattern Recognit. A reflectance re-weighted Retinex model for non-uniform and low-light image enhancement pdf
2023 Pattern Recognit. SurroundNet: Towards effective low-light image enhancement pdf code SurroundNet
2023 ICCV Coherent event guided low-light video enhancement pdf code web EvLowLight
2023 ICCV Dancing in the dark: A benchmark towards general low-light video enhancement pdf code DID
2023 ICCV Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model pdf Diff-Retinex
2023 ICCV Empowering low-light image enhancer through customized learnable priors pdf code CUE
2023 ICCV ExposureDiffusion: Learning to expose for low-light image enhancement pdf code ExposureDiffusion
2023 ICCV Implicit neural representation for cooperative low-light image enhancement pdf code NeRCo
2023 ICCV Low-light image enhancement with illumination-aware gamma correction and complete image modelling network pdf COMO-ViT
2023 ICCV Low-light image enhancement with multi-stage residue quantization and brightness-aware attention pdf code RQ-LLIE
2023 ICCV Retinexformer: One-stage retinex-based transformer for low-light image enhancement pdf code Retinexformer
2023 ICCV Lighting up NeRF via unsupervised decomposition and enhancement pdf code LLNeRF
2023 PRICAI Bootstrap diffusion model curve estimation for high resolution low-light image enhancement pdf BDCE
2023 Appl. Mach. Learn. LoLi-IEA: low-light image enhancement algorithm pdf code LoLi-IEA
2024 IEEE Sens. Lett. Integrating Graph Convolution Into a Deep Multilayer Framework for Low-Light Image Enhancement pdf code
2025 Digital Signal Process. CDAN: Convolutional dense attention-guided network for low-light image enhancement pdf code CDAN

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

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
2023 ICCV Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model pdf Diff-Retinex
2023 ICCV Retinexformer: One-stage retinex-based transformer for low-light image enhancement pdf code Retinexformer

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 ICCV FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision pdf code Web FeatEnHancer object detection and semantic segmentation
2023 IEEE TIP INFWIDE: Image and feature space wiener deconvolution network for non-blind image deblurring in low-light conditions pdf code INFWIDE deblurring
2024 AAAI Aleth-NeRF: Illumination Adaptive NeRF with Concealing Field Assumption pdf code web Aleth-NeRF NeRF

Metrics

Metric Abbr Full-/Non-Reference Link
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio PSNR Full-Reference -
Structural Similarity Index Measure SSIM Full-Reference -
Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity LPIPS Full-Reference code
Lightness Order Error LOE Non-Reference paper
Natural Image Quality Evaluator NIQE Non-Reference paper
Mean Square Error MSE Full-Reference -
Mean Absolute Error MAE Full-Reference -
Smartphone Photography Attribute and Quality SPAQ Non-Reference code
Neural Image Assessment NIMA Non-Reference pytorch tensorflow
Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer MUSIQ Non-Reference code

Reference