Image-Enhancement.md

Image Enhancement

Title	Date	Abstract	Comment	CodeRepository
CURVE: CLIP-Utilized Reinforcement Learning for Visual Image Enhancement via Simple Image Processing	2025-05-29	Show Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is crucial for improving both human perception and computer vision tasks. This paper addresses two challenges in zero-reference LLIE: obtaining perceptually 'good' images using the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model and maintaining computational efficiency for high-resolution images. We propose CLIP-Utilized Reinforcement learning-based Visual image Enhancement (CURVE). CURVE employs a simple image processing module which adjusts global image tone based on B'ezier curve and estimates its processing parameters iteratively. The estimator is trained by reinforcement learning with rewards designed using CLIP text embeddings. Experiments on low-light and multi-exposure datasets demonstrate the performance of CURVE in terms of enhancement quality and processing speed compared to conventional methods.	Accepted to ICIP2025	None
URWKV: Unified RWKV Model with Multi-state Perspective for Low-light Image Restoration	2025-05-29	Show Existing low-light image enhancement (LLIE) and joint LLIE and deblurring (LLIE-deblur) models have made strides in addressing predefined degradations, yet they are often constrained by dynamically coupled degradations. To address these challenges, we introduce a Unified Receptance Weighted Key Value (URWKV) model with multi-state perspective, enabling flexible and effective degradation restoration for low-light images. Specifically, we customize the core URWKV block to perceive and analyze complex degradations by leveraging multiple intra- and inter-stage states. First, inspired by the pupil mechanism in the human visual system, we propose Luminance-adaptive Normalization (LAN) that adjusts normalization parameters based on rich inter-stage states, allowing for adaptive, scene-aware luminance modulation. Second, we aggregate multiple intra-stage states through exponential moving average approach, effectively capturing subtle variations while mitigating information loss inherent in the single-state mechanism. To reduce the degradation effects commonly associated with conventional skip connections, we propose the State-aware Selective Fusion (SSF) module, which dynamically aligns and integrates multi-state features across encoder stages, selectively fusing contextual information. In comparison to state-of-the-art models, our URWKV model achieves superior performance on various benchmarks, while requiring significantly fewer parameters and computational resources.	This ... This paper has been accepted to CVPR 2025	None
Vision-Based Assistive Technologies for People with Cerebral Visual Impairment: A Review and Focus Study	2025-05-29	Show Over the past decade, considerable research has investigated Vision-Based Assistive Technologies (VBAT) to support people with vision impairments to understand and interact with their immediate environment using machine learning, computer vision, image enhancement, and/or augmented/virtual reality. However, this has almost totally overlooked a growing demographic: people with Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI). Unlike ocular vision impairments, CVI arises from damage to the brain's visual processing centres. Through a scoping review, this paper reveals a significant research gap in addressing the needs of this demographic. Three focus studies involving 7 participants with CVI explored the challenges, current strategies, and opportunities for VBAT. We also discussed the assistive technology needs of people with CVI compared with ocular low vision. Our findings highlight the opportunity for the Human-Computer Interaction and Assistive Technologies research community to explore and address this underrepresented domain, thereby enhancing the quality of life for people with CVI.	Autho... Author's accepted version of a paper published at ASSETS 2024 (October, 2024). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2505.21875	None
GL-PGENet: A Parameterized Generation Framework for Robust Document Image Enhancement	2025-05-28	Show Document Image Enhancement (DIE) serves as a critical component in Document AI systems, where its performance substantially determines the effectiveness of downstream tasks. To address the limitations of existing methods confined to single-degradation restoration or grayscale image processing, we present Global with Local Parametric Generation Enhancement Network (GL-PGENet), a novel architecture designed for multi-degraded color document images, ensuring both efficiency and robustness in real-world scenarios. Our solution incorporates three key innovations: First, a hierarchical enhancement framework that integrates global appearance correction with local refinement, enabling coarse-to-fine quality improvement. Second, a Dual-Branch Local-Refine Network with parametric generation mechanisms that replaces conventional direct prediction, producing enhanced outputs through learned intermediate parametric representations rather than pixel-wise mapping. This approach enhances local consistency while improving model generalization. Finally, a modified NestUNet architecture incorporating dense block to effectively fuse low-level pixel features and high-level semantic features, specifically adapted for document image characteristics. In addition, to enhance generalization performance, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: large-scale pretraining on a synthetic dataset of 500,000+ samples followed by task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GL-PGENet, achieving state-of-the-art SSIM scores of 0.7721 on DocUNet and 0.9480 on RealDAE. The model also exhibits remarkable cross-domain adaptability and maintains computational efficiency for high-resolution images without performance degradation, confirming its practical utility in real-world scenarios.	12 pages, 7 figures	None
Broadening Our View: Assistive Technology for Cerebral Visual Impairment	2025-05-28	Show Over the past decade, considerable research has been directed towards assistive technologies to support people with vision impairments using machine learning, computer vision, image enhancement, and/or augmented/virtual reality. However, this has almost totally overlooked a growing demographic: people with Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI). Unlike Ocular Vision Impairments (OVI), CVI arises from damage to the brain's visual processing centres. This paper introduces CVI and reveals a wide research gap in addressing the needs of this demographic. Through a scoping review, we identified 14 papers at the intersection of these technologies and CVI. Of these, only three papers described assistive technologies focused on people living with CVI, with the others focusing on diagnosis, understanding, simulation or rehabilitation. Our findings highlight the opportunity for the Human-Computer Interaction and Assistive Technologies research community to explore and address this underrepresented domain, thereby enhancing the quality of life for people with CVI.	Autho... Author's accepted version of a LBW paper published in Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24)	None
See through the Dark: Learning Illumination-affined Representations for Nighttime Occupancy Prediction	2025-05-27	Show Occupancy prediction aims to estimate the 3D spatial distribution of occupied regions along with their corresponding semantic labels. Existing vision-based methods perform well on daytime benchmarks but struggle in nighttime scenarios due to limited visibility and challenging lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{LIAR}, a novel framework that learns illumination-affined representations. LIAR first introduces Selective Low-light Image Enhancement (SLLIE), which leverages the illumination priors from daytime scenes to adaptively determine whether a nighttime image is genuinely dark or sufficiently well-lit, enabling more targeted global enhancement. Building on the illumination maps generated by SLLIE, LIAR further incorporates two illumination-aware components: 2D Illumination-guided Sampling (2D-IGS) and 3D Illumination-driven Projection (3D-IDP), to respectively tackle local underexposure and overexposure. Specifically, 2D-IGS modulates feature sampling positions according to illumination maps, assigning larger offsets to darker regions and smaller ones to brighter regions, thereby alleviating feature degradation in underexposed areas. Subsequently, 3D-IDP enhances semantic understanding in overexposed regions by constructing illumination intensity fields and supplying refined residual queries to the BEV context refinement process. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superior performance of LIAR under challenging nighttime scenarios. The source code and pretrained models are available \href{https://github.com/yanzq95/LIAR}{here}.		Code Link
Underwater Diffusion Attention Network with Contrastive Language-Image Joint Learning for Underwater Image Enhancement	2025-05-26	Show Underwater images are often affected by complex degradations such as light absorption, scattering, color casts, and artifacts, making enhancement critical for effective object detection, recognition, and scene understanding in aquatic environments. Existing methods, especially diffusion-based approaches, typically rely on synthetic paired datasets due to the scarcity of real underwater references, introducing bias and limiting generalization. Furthermore, fine-tuning these models can degrade learned priors, resulting in unrealistic enhancements due to domain shifts. To address these challenges, we propose UDAN-CLIP, an image-to-image diffusion framework pre-trained on synthetic underwater datasets and enhanced with a customized classifier based on vision-language model, a spatial attention module, and a novel CLIP-Diffusion loss. The classifier preserves natural in-air priors and semantically guides the diffusion process, while the spatial attention module focuses on correcting localized degradations such as haze and low contrast. The proposed CLIP-Diffusion loss further strengthens visual-textual alignment and helps maintain semantic consistency during enhancement. The proposed contributions empower our UDAN-CLIP model to perform more effective underwater image enhancement, producing results that are not only visually compelling but also more realistic and detail-preserving. These improvements are consistently validated through both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual comparisons, demonstrating the model's ability to correct distortions and restore natural appearance in challenging underwater conditions.		None
Improving Novel view synthesis of 360$^\circ$ Scenes in Extremely Sparse Views by Jointly Training Hemisphere Sampled Synthetic Images	2025-05-25	Show Novel view synthesis in 360$^\circ$ scenes from extremely sparse input views is essential for applications like virtual reality and augmented reality. This paper presents a novel framework for novel view synthesis in extremely sparse-view cases. As typical structure-from-motion methods are unable to estimate camera poses in extremely sparse-view cases, we apply DUSt3R to estimate camera poses and generate a dense point cloud. Using the poses of estimated cameras, we densely sample additional views from the upper hemisphere space of the scenes, from which we render synthetic images together with the point cloud. Training 3D Gaussian Splatting model on a combination of reference images from sparse views and densely sampled synthetic images allows a larger scene coverage in 3D space, addressing the overfitting challenge due to the limited input in sparse-view cases. Retraining a diffusion-based image enhancement model on our created dataset, we further improve the quality of the point-cloud-rendered images by removing artifacts. We compare our framework with benchmark methods in cases of only four input views, demonstrating significant improvement in novel view synthesis under extremely sparse-view conditions for 360$^\circ$ scenes.		None
Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration	2025-05-19	Show All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clear images from various degradation types and levels with a unified model. Nonetheless, the significant variations among degradation types present challenges for training a universal model, often resulting in task interference, where the gradient update directions of different tasks may diverge due to shared parameters. To address this issue, motivated by the routing strategy, we propose DFPIR, a novel all-in-one image restorer that introduces Degradation-aware Feature Perturbations(DFP) to adjust the feature space to align with the unified parameter space. In this paper, the feature perturbations primarily include channel-wise perturbations and attention-wise perturbations. Specifically, channel-wise perturbations are implemented by shuffling the channels in high-dimensional space guided by degradation types, while attention-wise perturbations are achieved through selective masking in the attention space. To achieve these goals, we propose a Degradation-Guided Perturbation Block (DGPB) to implement these two functions, positioned between the encoding and decoding stages of the encoder-decoder architecture. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DFPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on several all-in-one image restoration tasks including image denoising, image dehazing, image deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our codes are available at https://github.com/TxpHome/DFPIR.	Accep... Accepted to CVPR 2025. 8 pages, 7 figures	Code Link
Entropy-Driven Genetic Optimization for Deep-Feature-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-05-16	Show Image enhancement methods often prioritize pixel level information, overlooking the semantic features. We propose a novel, unsupervised, fuzzy-inspired image enhancement framework guided by NSGA-II algorithm that optimizes image brightness, contrast, and gamma parameters to achieve a balance between visual quality and semantic fidelity. Central to our proposed method is the use of a pre trained deep neural network as a feature extractor. To find the best enhancement settings, we use a GPU-accelerated NSGA-II algorithm that balances multiple objectives, namely, increasing image entropy, improving perceptual similarity, and maintaining appropriate brightness. We further improve the results by applying a local search phase to fine-tune the top candidates from the genetic algorithm. Our approach operates entirely without paired training data making it broadly applicable across domains with limited or noisy labels. Quantitatively, our model achieves excellent performance with average BRISQUE and NIQE scores of 19.82 and 3.652, respectively, in all unpaired datasets. Qualitatively, enhanced images by our model exhibit significantly improved visibility in shadowed regions, natural balance of contrast and also preserve the richer fine detail without introducing noticable artifacts. This work opens new directions for unsupervised image enhancement where semantic consistency is critical.		None
Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks based Video Enhancement	2025-05-14	Show This study introduces an enhanced approach to video super-resolution by extending ordinary Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) structure to handle spatio-temporal data. While SRGAN has proven effective for single-image enhancement, its design does not account for the temporal continuity required in video processing. To address this, a modified framework that incorporates 3D Non-Local Blocks is proposed, which is enabling the model to capture relationships across both spatial and temporal dimensions. An experimental training pipeline is developed, based on patch-wise learning and advanced data degradation techniques, to simulate real-world video conditions and learn from both local and global structures and details. This helps the model generalize better and maintain stability across varying video content while maintaining the general structure besides the pixel-wise correctness. Two model variants-one larger and one more lightweight-are presented to explore the trade-offs between performance and efficiency. The results demonstrate improved temporal coherence, sharper textures, and fewer visual artifacts compared to traditional single-image methods. This work contributes to the development of practical, learning-based solutions for video enhancement tasks, with potential applications in streaming, gaming, and digital restoration.		None
PDE: Gene Effect Inspired Parameter Dynamic Evolution for Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-05-14	Show 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.	11 pa... 11 pages, 9 tables, 9 figures	None
A review of advancements in low-light image enhancement using deep learning	2025-05-09	Show In low-light environments, the performance of computer vision algorithms often deteriorates significantly, adversely affecting key vision tasks such as segmentation, detection, and classification. With the rapid advancement of deep learning, its application to low-light image processing has attracted widespread attention and seen significant progress in recent years. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically examine how recent deep-learning-based low-light image enhancement methods function and evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing downstream vison tasks. To address this gap, this review provides a detailed elaboration on how various recent approaches (from 2020) operate and their enhancement mechanisms, supplemented with clear illustrations. It also investigates the impact of different enhancement techniques on subsequent vision tasks, critically analyzing their strengths and limitations. Additionally, it proposes future research directions. This review serves as a useful reference for determining low-light image enhancement techniques and optimizing vision task performance in low-light conditions.		None
Semantic Style Transfer for Enhancing Animal Facial Landmark Detection	2025-05-08	Show Neural Style Transfer (NST) is a technique for applying the visual characteristics of one image onto another while preserving structural content. Traditionally used for artistic transformations, NST has recently been adapted, e.g., for domain adaptation and data augmentation. This study investigates the use of this technique for enhancing animal facial landmark detectors training. As a case study, we use a recently introduced Ensemble Landmark Detector for 48 anatomical cat facial landmarks and the CatFLW dataset it was trained on, making three main contributions. First, we demonstrate that applying style transfer to cropped facial images rather than full-body images enhances structural consistency, improving the quality of generated images. Secondly, replacing training images with style-transferred versions raised challenges of annotation misalignment, but Supervised Style Transfer (SST) - which selects style sources based on landmark accuracy - retained up to 98% of baseline accuracy. Finally, augmenting the dataset with style-transferred images further improved robustness, outperforming traditional augmentation methods. These findings establish semantic style transfer as an effective augmentation strategy for enhancing the performance of facial landmark detection models for animals and beyond. While this study focuses on cat facial landmarks, the proposed method can be generalized to other species and landmark detection models.		None
ADNP-15: An Open-Source Histopathological Dataset for Neuritic Plaque Segmentation in Human Brain Whole Slide Images with Frequency Domain Image Enhancement for Stain Normalization	2025-05-08	Show Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by amyloid-beta plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles, which serve as key histopathological features. The identification and segmentation of these lesions are crucial for understanding AD progression but remain challenging due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets and the impact of staining variations on automated image analysis. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for pathology image segmentation; however, model performance is significantly influenced by variations in staining characteristics, necessitating effective stain normalization and enhancement techniques. In this study, we address these challenges by introducing an open-source dataset (ADNP-15) of neuritic plaques (i.e., amyloid deposits combined with a crown of dystrophic tau-positive neurites) in human brain whole slide images. We establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating five widely adopted deep learning models across four stain normalization techniques, providing deeper insights into their influence on neuritic plaque segmentation. Additionally, we propose a novel image enhancement method that improves segmentation accuracy, particularly in complex tissue structures, by enhancing structural details and mitigating staining inconsistencies. Our experimental results demonstrate that this enhancement strategy significantly boosts model generalization and segmentation accuracy. All datasets and code are open-source, ensuring transparency and reproducibility while enabling further advancements in the field.		None
MambaNUT: Nighttime UAV Tracking via Mamba-based Adaptive Curriculum Learning	2025-05-08	Show Harnessing low-light enhancement and domain adaptation, nighttime UAV tracking has made substantial strides. However, over-reliance on image enhancement, limited high-quality nighttime data, and a lack of integration between daytime and nighttime trackers hinder the development of an end-to-end trainable framework. Additionally, current ViT-based trackers demand heavy computational resources due to their reliance on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel pure Mamba-based tracking framework (MambaNUT) that employs a state space model with linear complexity as its backbone, incorporating a single-stream architecture that integrates feature learning and template-search coupling within Vision Mamba. We introduce an adaptive curriculum learning (ACL) approach that dynamically adjusts sampling strategies and loss weights, thereby improving the model's ability of generalization. Our ACL is composed of two levels of curriculum schedulers: (1) sampling scheduler that transforms the data distribution from imbalanced to balanced, as well as from easier (daytime) to harder (nighttime) samples; (2) loss scheduler that dynamically assigns weights based on the size of the training data and IoU of individual instances. Exhaustive experiments on multiple nighttime UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaNUT achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring lower computational costs. The code will be available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/MambaNUT.		Code Link
TS-Diff: Two-Stage Diffusion Model for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement	2025-05-07	Show This paper presents a novel Two-Stage Diffusion Model (TS-Diff) for enhancing extremely low-light RAW images. In the pre-training stage, TS-Diff synthesizes noisy images by constructing multiple virtual cameras based on a noise space. Camera Feature Integration (CFI) modules are then designed to enable the model to learn generalizable features across diverse virtual cameras. During the aligning stage, CFIs are averaged to create a target-specific CFI$^T$, which is fine-tuned using a small amount of real RAW data to adapt to the noise characteristics of specific cameras. A structural reparameterization technique further simplifies CFI$^T$ for efficient deployment. To address color shifts during the diffusion process, a color corrector is introduced to ensure color consistency by dynamically adjusting global color distributions. Additionally, a novel dataset, QID, is constructed, featuring quantifiable illumination levels and a wide dynamic range, providing a comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluation under extreme low-light conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that TS-Diff achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, including QID, SID, and ELD, excelling in denoising, generalization, and color consistency across various cameras and illumination levels. These findings highlight the robustness and versatility of TS-Diff, making it a practical solution for low-light imaging applications. Source codes and models are available at https://github.com/CircccleK/TS-Diff	Inter... International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)	Code Link
Towards A Robust Group-level Emotion Recognition via Uncertainty-Aware Learning	2025-05-06	Show Group-level emotion recognition (GER) is an inseparable part of human behavior analysis, aiming to recognize an overall emotion in a multi-person scene. However, the existing methods are devoted to combing diverse emotion cues while ignoring the inherent uncertainties under unconstrained environments, such as congestion and occlusion occurring within a group. Additionally, since only group-level labels are available, inconsistent emotion predictions among individuals in one group can confuse the network. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware learning (UAL) method to extract more robust representations for GER. By explicitly modeling the uncertainty of each individual, we utilize stochastic embedding drawn from a Gaussian distribution instead of deterministic point embedding. This representation captures the probabilities of different emotions and generates diverse predictions through this stochasticity during the inference stage. Furthermore, uncertainty-sensitive scores are adaptively assigned as the fusion weights of individuals' face within each group. Moreover, we develop an image enhancement module to enhance the model's robustness against severe noise. The overall three-branch model, encompassing face, object, and scene component, is guided by a proportional-weighted fusion strategy and integrates the proposed uncertainty-aware method to produce the final group-level output. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our method across three widely used databases.	11 pages,3 figures	None
DDaTR: Dynamic Difference-aware Temporal Residual Network for Longitudinal Radiology Report Generation	2025-05-06	Show Radiology Report Generation (RRG) automates the creation of radiology reports from medical imaging, enhancing the efficiency of the reporting process. Longitudinal Radiology Report Generation (LRRG) extends RRG by incorporating the ability to compare current and prior exams, facilitating the tracking of temporal changes in clinical findings. Existing LRRG approaches only extract features from prior and current images using a visual pre-trained encoder, which are then concatenated to generate the final report. However, these methods struggle to effectively capture both spatial and temporal correlations during the feature extraction process. Consequently, the extracted features inadequately capture the information of difference across exams and thus underrepresent the expected progressions, leading to sub-optimal performance in LRRG. To address this, we develop a novel dynamic difference-aware temporal residual network (DDaTR). In DDaTR, we introduce two modules at each stage of the visual encoder to capture multi-level spatial correlations. The Dynamic Feature Alignment Module (DFAM) is designed to align prior features across modalities for the integrity of prior clinical information. Prompted by the enriched prior features, the dynamic difference-aware module (DDAM) captures favorable difference information by identifying relationships across exams. Furthermore, our DDaTR employs the dynamic residual network to unidirectionally transmit longitudinal information, effectively modelling temporal correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrated superior performance over existing methods on three benchmarks, proving its efficacy in both RRG and LRRG tasks.		None
MSFNet-CPD: Multi-Scale Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Crop Pest Detection	2025-05-05	Show Accurate identification of agricultural pests is essential for crop protection but remains challenging due to the large intra-class variance and fine-grained differences among pest species. While deep learning has advanced pest detection, most existing approaches rely solely on low-level visual features and lack effective multi-modal integration, leading to limited accuracy and poor interpretability. Moreover, the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal agricultural datasets further restricts progress in this field. To address these issues, we construct two novel multi-modal benchmarks-CTIP102 and STIP102-based on the widely-used IP102 dataset, and introduce a Multi-scale Cross-Modal Fusion Network (MSFNet-CPD) for robust pest detection. Our approach enhances visual quality via a super-resolution reconstruction module, and feeds both the original and reconstructed images into the network to improve clarity and detection performance. To better exploit semantic cues, we propose an Image-Text Fusion (ITF) module for joint modeling of visual and textual features, and an Image-Text Converter (ITC) that reconstructs fine-grained details across multiple scales to handle challenging backgrounds. Furthermore, we introduce an Arbitrary Combination Image Enhancement (ACIE) strategy to generate a more complex and diverse pest detection dataset, MTIP102, improving the model's generalization to real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSFNet-CPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple pest detection benchmarks. All code and datasets will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Healer-ML/MSFNet-CPD.	Accep... Accepted to IJCNN 2025	Code Link
Underwater Image Enhancement via Dehazing and Color Restoration	2025-05-04	Show Underwater visual imaging is crucial for marine engineering, but it suffers from low contrast, blurriness, and color degradation, which hinders downstream analysis. Existing underwater image enhancement methods often treat the haze and color cast as a unified degradation process, neglecting their inherent independence while overlooking their synergistic relationship. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based network (referred to as WaterFormer) to improve underwater image quality. WaterFormer contains three major components: a dehazing block (DehazeFormer Block) to capture the self-correlated haze features and extract deep-level features, a Color Restoration Block (CRB) to capture self-correlated color cast features, and a Channel Fusion Block (CFB) that dynamically integrates these decoupled features to achieve comprehensive enhancement. To ensure authenticity, a soft reconstruction layer based on the underwater imaging physics model is included. Further, a Chromatic Consistency Loss and Sobel Color Loss are designed to respectively preserve color fidelity and enhance structural details during network training. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that WaterFormer outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in enhancing underwater images.		None
HiLLIE: Human-in-the-Loop Training for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-05-04	Show Developing effective approaches to generate enhanced results that align well with human visual preferences for high-quality well-lit images remains a challenge in low-light image enhancement (LLIE). In this paper, we propose a human-in-the-loop LLIE training framework that improves the visual quality of unsupervised LLIE model outputs through iterative training stages, named HiLLIE. At each stage, we introduce human guidance into the training process through efficient visual quality annotations of enhanced outputs. Subsequently, we employ a tailored image quality assessment (IQA) model to learn human visual preferences encoded in the acquired labels, which is then utilized to guide the training process of an enhancement model. With only a small amount of pairwise ranking annotations required at each stage, our approach continually improves the IQA model's capability to simulate human visual assessment of enhanced outputs, thus leading to visually appealing LLIE results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves unsupervised LLIE model performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative performance. The code and collected ranking dataset will be available at https://github.com/LabShuHangGU/HiLLIE.		Code Link
The Loop Game: Quality Assessment and Optimization for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-05-03	Show There is an increasing consensus that the design and optimization of low light image enhancement methods need to be fully driven by perceptual quality. With numerous approaches proposed to enhance low-light images, much less work has been dedicated to quality assessment and quality optimization of low-light enhancement. In this paper, to close the gap between enhancement and assessment, we propose a loop enhancement framework that produces a clear picture of how the enhancement of low-light images could be optimized towards better visual quality. In particular, we create a large-scale database for QUality assessment Of The Enhanced LOw-Light Image (QUOTE-LOL), which serves as the foundation in studying and developing objective quality assessment measures. The objective quality assessment measure plays a critical bridging role between visual quality and enhancement and is further incorporated in the optimization in learning the enhancement model towards perceptual optimally. Finally, we iteratively perform the enhancement and optimization tasks, enhancing the low-light images continuously. The superiority of the proposed scheme is validated based on various low-light scenes.		None
ImageR: Enhancing Bug Report Clarity by Screenshots	2025-05-03	Show In issue-tracking systems, incorporating screenshots significantly enhances the clarity of bug reports, facilitating more efficient communication and expediting issue resolution. However, determining when and what type of visual content to include remains challenging, as not all attachments effectively contribute to problem-solving; studies indicate that 22.5% of images in issue reports fail to aid in resolving the reported issues. To address this, we introduce ImageR, an AI model and tool that analyzes issue reports to assess the potential benefits of including screenshots and recommends the most pertinent types when appropriate. By proactively suggesting relevant visuals, ImageR aims to make issue reports clearer, more informative, and time-efficient. We have curated and publicly shared a dataset comprising 6,235 Bugzilla issues, each meticulously labeled with the type of image attachment, providing a valuable resource for benchmarking and advancing research in image processing within developer communication contexts. To evaluate ImageR, we conducted empirical experiments on a subset of these reports from various Mozilla projects. The tool achieved an F1-score of 0.76 in determining when images are needed, with 75% of users finding its recommendations highly valuable. By minimizing the back-and-forth communication often needed to obtain suitable screenshots, ImageR streamlines the bug reporting process. Furthermore, it guides users in selecting the most effective visual documentation from ten established categories, potentially reducing resolution times and improving the quality of bug documentation. ImageR is open-source, inviting further use and improvement by the community. The labeled dataset offers a rare resource for benchmarking and exploring image processing in the context of developer communication.	Paper... Paper accepted to EASE 2025	None
Multi-Scale Target-Aware Representation Learning for Fundus Image Enhancement	2025-05-03	Show High-quality fundus images provide essential anatomical information for clinical screening and ophthalmic disease diagnosis. Yet, due to hardware limitations, operational variability, and patient compliance, fundus images often suffer from low resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. Recent years have witnessed promising progress in fundus image enhancement. However, existing works usually focus on restoring structural details or global characteristics of fundus images, lacking a unified image enhancement framework to recover comprehensive multi-scale information. Moreover, few methods pinpoint the target of image enhancement, e.g., lesions, which is crucial for medical image-based diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-scale target-aware representation learning framework (MTRL-FIE) for efficient fundus image enhancement. Specifically, we propose a multi-scale feature encoder (MFE) that employs wavelet decomposition to embed both low-frequency structural information and high-frequency details. Next, we design a structure-preserving hierarchical decoder (SHD) to fuse multi-scale feature embeddings for real fundus image restoration. SHD integrates hierarchical fusion and group attention mechanisms to achieve adaptive feature fusion while retaining local structural smoothness. Meanwhile, a target-aware feature aggregation (TFA) module is used to enhance pathological regions and reduce artifacts. Experimental results on multiple fundus image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of MTRL-FIE for fundus image enhancement. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, MTRL-FIE achieves superior enhancement performance with a more lightweight architecture. Furthermore, our approach generalizes to other ophthalmic image processing tasks without supervised fine-tuning, highlighting its potential for clinical applications.	Under... Under review at Neural Networks	None
RD-UIE: Relation-Driven State Space Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement	2025-05-02	Show Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a critical preprocessing step for marine vision applications, where wavelength-dependent attenuation causes severe content degradation and color distortion. While recent state space models like Mamba show potential for long-range dependency modeling, their unfolding operations and fixed scan paths on 1D sequences fail to adapt to local object semantics and global relation modeling, limiting their efficacy in complex underwater environments. To address this, we enhance conventional Mamba with the sorting-based scanning mechanism that dynamically reorders scanning sequences based on statistical distribution of spatial correlation of all pixels. In this way, it encourages the network to prioritize the most informative components--structural and semantic features. Upon building this mechanism, we devise a Visually Self-adaptive State Block (VSSB) that harmonizes dynamic sorting of Mamba with input-dependent dynamic convolution, enabling coherent integration of global context and local relational cues. This exquisite design helps eliminate global focus bias, especially for widely distributed contents, which greatly weakens the statistical frequency. For robust feature extraction and refinement, we design a cross-feature bridge (CFB) to adaptively fuse multi-scale representations. These efforts compose the novel relation-driven Mamba framework for effective UIE (RD-UIE). Extensive experiments on underwater enhancement benchmarks demonstrate RD-UIE outperforms the state-of-the-art approach WMamba in both quantitative metrics and visual fidelity, averagely achieving 0.55 dB performance gain on the three benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kkoucy/RD-UIE/tree/main		Code Link
VR-FuseNet: A Fusion of Heterogeneous Fundus Data and Explainable Deep Network for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification	2025-04-30	Show Diabetic retinopathy is a severe eye condition caused by diabetes where the retinal blood vessels get damaged and can lead to vision loss and blindness if not treated. Early and accurate detection is key to intervention and stopping the disease progressing. For addressing this disease properly, this paper presents a comprehensive approach for automated diabetic retinopathy detection by proposing a new hybrid deep learning model called VR-FuseNet. Diabetic retinopathy is a major eye disease and leading cause of blindness especially among diabetic patients so accurate and efficient automated detection methods are required. To address the limitations of existing methods including dataset imbalance, diversity and generalization issues this paper presents a hybrid dataset created from five publicly available diabetic retinopathy datasets. Essential preprocessing techniques such as SMOTE for class balancing and CLAHE for image enhancement are applied systematically to the dataset to improve the robustness and generalizability of the dataset. The proposed VR-FuseNet model combines the strengths of two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, VGG19 which captures fine-grained spatial features and ResNet50V2 which is known for its deep hierarchical feature extraction. This fusion improves the diagnostic performance and achieves an accuracy of 91.824%. The model outperforms individual architectures on all performance metrics demonstrating the effectiveness of hybrid feature extraction in Diabetic Retinopathy classification tasks. To make the proposed model more clinically useful and interpretable this paper incorporates multiple XAI techniques. These techniques generate visual explanations that clearly indicate the retinal features affecting the model's prediction such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages and exudates so that clinicians can interpret and validate.	33 pages, 49 figures	None
FusionNet: Multi-model Linear Fusion Framework for Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-04-27	Show The advent of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has driven remarkable progress in low-light image enhancement (LLIE), with diverse architectures (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) and color spaces (e.g., sRGB, HSV, HVI) yielding impressive results. Recent efforts have sought to leverage the complementary strengths of these paradigms, offering promising solutions to enhance performance across varying degradation scenarios. However, existing fusion strategies are hindered by challenges such as parameter explosion, optimization instability, and feature misalignment, limiting further improvements. To overcome these issues, we introduce FusionNet, a novel multi-model linear fusion framework that operates in parallel to effectively capture global and local features across diverse color spaces. By incorporating a linear fusion strategy underpinned by Hilbert space theoretical guarantees, FusionNet mitigates network collapse and reduces excessive training costs. Our method achieved 1st place in the CVPR2025 NTIRE Low Light Enhancement Challenge. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results, delivering robust enhancement under diverse low-light conditions.		None
Adaptive Dual-domain Learning for Underwater Image Enhancement	2025-04-27	Show Recently, learning-based Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods have demonstrated promising performance. However, existing learning-based methods still face two challenges. 1) They rarely consider the inconsistent degradation levels in different spatial regions and spectral bands simultaneously. 2) They treat all regions equally, ignoring that the regions with high-frequency details are more difficult to reconstruct. To address these challenges, we propose a novel UIE method based on spatial-spectral dual-domain adaptive learning, termed SS-UIE. Specifically, we first introduce a spatial-wise Multi-scale Cycle Selective Scan (MCSS) module and a Spectral-Wise Self-Attention (SWSA) module, both with linear complexity, and combine them in parallel to form a basic Spatial-Spectral block (SS-block). Benefiting from the global receptive field of MCSS and SWSA, SS-block can effectively model the degradation levels of different spatial regions and spectral bands, thereby enabling degradation level-based dual-domain adaptive UIE. By stacking multiple SS-blocks, we build our SS-UIE network. Additionally, a Frequency-Wise Loss (FWL) is introduced to narrow the frequency-wise discrepancy and reinforce the model's attention on the regions with high-frequency details. Extensive experiments validate that the SS-UIE technique outperforms state-of-the-art UIE methods while requiring cheaper computational and memory costs.	Accep... Accepted by AAAI 2025	None
DeepSPG: Exploring Deep Semantic Prior Guidance for Low-light Image Enhancement with Multimodal Learning	2025-04-27	Show There has long been a belief that high-level semantics learning can benefit various downstream computer vision tasks. However, in the low-light image enhancement (LLIE) community, existing methods learn a brutal mapping between low-light and normal-light domains without considering the semantic information of different regions, especially in those extremely dark regions that suffer from severe information loss. To address this issue, we propose a new deep semantic prior-guided framework (DeepSPG) based on Retinex image decomposition for LLIE to explore informative semantic knowledge via a pre-trained semantic segmentation model and multimodal learning. Notably, we incorporate both image-level semantic prior and text-level semantic prior and thus formulate a multimodal learning framework with combinatorial deep semantic prior guidance for LLIE. Specifically, we incorporate semantic knowledge to guide the enhancement process via three designs: an image-level semantic prior guidance by leveraging hierarchical semantic features from a pre-trained semantic segmentation model; a text-level semantic prior guidance by integrating natural language semantic constraints via a pre-trained vision-language model; a multi-scale semantic-aware structure that facilitates effective semantic feature incorporation. Eventually, our proposed DeepSPG demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods across five benchmark datasets. The implementation details and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Wenyuzhy/DeepSPG.	Accep... Accepted by ICMR 2025 Main track. Code is available at https://github.com/Wenyuzhy/DeepSPG	Code Link
RSEND: Retinex-based Squeeze and Excitation Network with Dark Region Detection for Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-24	Show Images captured under low-light scenarios often suffer from low quality. Previous CNN-based deep learning methods often involve using Retinex theory. Nevertheless, most of them cannot perform well in more complicated datasets like LOL-v2 while consuming too much computational resources. Besides, some of these methods require sophisticated training at different stages, making the procedure even more time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a more accurate, concise, and one-stage Retinex theory based framework, RSEND. RSEND first divides the low-light image into the illumination map and reflectance map, then captures the important details in the illumination map and performs light enhancement. After this step, it refines the enhanced gray-scale image and does element-wise matrix multiplication with the reflectance map. By denoising the output it has from the previous step, it obtains the final result. In all the steps, RSEND utilizes Squeeze and Excitation network to better capture the details. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our Efficient Retinex model significantly outperforms other CNN-based models, achieving a PSNR improvement ranging from 0.44 dB to 4.2 dB in different datasets and even outperforms transformer-based models in the LOL-v2-real dataset.		None
AdaViP: Aligning Multi-modal LLMs via Adaptive Vision-enhanced Preference Optimization	2025-04-22	Show Preference alignment through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human preferences. However, existing methods focus primarily on language preferences while neglecting the critical visual context. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Vision-enhanced Preference optimization (AdaViP) that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) vision-based preference pair construction, which integrates multiple visual foundation models to strategically remove key visual elements from the image, enhancing MLLMs' sensitivity to visual details; and (2) adaptive preference optimization that dynamically balances vision- and language-based preferences for more accurate alignment. Extensive evaluations across different benchmarks demonstrate our effectiveness. Notably, our AdaViP-7B achieves 93.7% and 96.4% reductions in response-level and mentioned-level hallucination respectively on the Object HalBench, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.		None
SonarT165: A Large-scale Benchmark and STFTrack Framework for Acoustic Object Tracking	2025-04-22	Show Underwater observation systems typically integrate optical cameras and imaging sonar systems. When underwater visibility is insufficient, only sonar systems can provide stable data, which necessitates exploration of the underwater acoustic object tracking (UAOT) task. Previous studies have explored traditional methods and Siamese networks for UAOT. However, the absence of a unified evaluation benchmark has significantly constrained the value of these methods. To alleviate this limitation, we propose the first large-scale UAOT benchmark, SonarT165, comprising 165 square sequences, 165 fan sequences, and 205K high-quality annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that SonarT165 reveals limitations in current state-of-the-art SOT trackers. To address these limitations, we propose STFTrack, an efficient framework for acoustic object tracking. It includes two novel modules, a multi-view template fusion module (MTFM) and an optimal trajectory correction module (OTCM). The MTFM module integrates multi-view feature of both the original image and the binary image of the dynamic template, and introduces a cross-attention-like layer to fuse the spatio-temporal target representations. The OTCM module introduces the acoustic-response-equivalent pixel property and proposes normalized pixel brightness response scores, thereby suppressing suboptimal matches caused by inaccurate Kalman filter prediction boxes. To further improve the model feature, STFTrack introduces a acoustic image enhancement method and a Frequency Enhancement Module (FEM) into its tracking pipeline. Comprehensive experiments show the proposed STFTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/SonarT165.		Code Link
InstaRevive: One-Step Image Enhancement via Dynamic Score Matching	2025-04-22	Show Image enhancement finds wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios due to complex environments and the inherent limitations of imaging devices. Recent diffusion-based methods yield promising outcomes but necessitate prolonged and computationally intensive iterative sampling. In response, we propose InstaRevive, a straightforward yet powerful image enhancement framework that employs score-based diffusion distillation to harness potent generative capability and minimize the sampling steps. To fully exploit the potential of the pre-trained diffusion model, we devise a practical and effective diffusion distillation pipeline using dynamic control to address inaccuracies in updating direction during score matching. Our control strategy enables a dynamic diffusing scope, facilitating precise learning of denoising trajectories within the diffusion model and ensuring accurate distribution matching gradients during training. Additionally, to enrich guidance for the generative power, we incorporate textual prompts via image captioning as auxiliary conditions, fostering further exploration of the diffusion model. Extensive experiments substantiate the efficacy of our framework across a diverse array of challenging tasks and datasets, unveiling the compelling efficacy and efficiency of InstaRevive in delivering high-quality and visually appealing results. Code is available at https://github.com/EternalEvan/InstaRevive.	Accep... Accepted by ICLR 2025	Code Link
Structure-guided Diffusion Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-21	Show While the diffusion transformer (DiT) has become a focal point of interest in recent years, its application in low-light image enhancement remains a blank area for exploration. Current methods recover the details from low-light images while inevitably amplifying the noise in images, resulting in poor visual quality. In this paper, we firstly introduce DiT into the low-light enhancement task and design a novel Structure-guided Diffusion Transformer based Low-light image enhancement (SDTL) framework. We compress the feature through wavelet transform to improve the inference efficiency of the model and capture the multi-directional frequency band. Then we propose a Structure Enhancement Module (SEM) that uses structural prior to enhance the texture and leverages an adaptive fusion strategy to achieve more accurate enhancement effect. In Addition, we propose a Structure-guided Attention Block (SAB) to pay more attention to texture-riched tokens and avoid interference from noisy areas in noise prediction. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance on several popular datasets, validating the effectiveness of SDTL in improving image quality and the potential of DiT in low-light enhancement tasks.	Accep... Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)	None
Towards Scale-Aware Low-Light Enhancement via Structure-Guided Transformer Design	2025-04-18	Show Current Low-light Image Enhancement (LLIE) techniques predominantly rely on either direct Low-Light (LL) to Normal-Light (NL) mappings or guidance from semantic features or illumination maps. Nonetheless, the intrinsic ill-posedness of LLIE and the difficulty in retrieving robust semantics from heavily corrupted images hinder their effectiveness in extremely low-light environments. To tackle this challenge, we present SG-LLIE, a new multi-scale CNN-Transformer hybrid framework guided by structure priors. Different from employing pre-trained models for the extraction of semantics or illumination maps, we choose to extract robust structure priors based on illumination-invariant edge detectors. Moreover, we develop a CNN-Transformer Hybrid Structure-Guided Feature Extractor (HSGFE) module at each scale with in the UNet encoder-decoder architecture. Besides the CNN blocks which excels in multi-scale feature extraction and fusion, we introduce a Structure-Guided Transformer Block (SGTB) in each HSGFE that incorporates structural priors to modulate the enhancement process. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several LLIE benchmarks in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. Our solution ranks second in the NTIRE 2025 Low-Light Enhancement Challenge. Code is released at https://github.com/minyan8/imagine.	Accep... Accepted by CVPR 2025 NTIRE Workshop, Structure prior, CNN-Transformer, LLIE	Code Link
LDM-ISP: Enhancing Neural ISP for Low Light with Latent Diffusion Models	2025-04-18	Show Enhancing a low-light noisy RAW image into a well-exposed and clean sRGB image is a significant challenge for modern digital cameras. Prior approaches have difficulties in recovering fine-grained details and true colors of the scene under extremely low-light environments due to near-to-zero SNR. Meanwhile, diffusion models have shown significant progress towards general domain image generation. In this paper, we propose to leverage the pre-trained latent diffusion model to perform the neural ISP for enhancing extremely low-light images. Specifically, to tailor the pre-trained latent diffusion model to operate on the RAW domain, we train a set of lightweight taming modules to inject the RAW information into the diffusion denoising process via modulating the intermediate features of UNet. We further observe different roles of UNet denoising and decoder reconstruction in the latent diffusion model, which inspires us to decompose the low-light image enhancement task into latent-space low-frequency content generation and decoding-phase high-frequency detail maintenance. Through extensive experiments on representative datasets, we demonstrate our simple design not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in quantitative evaluations but also shows significant superiority in visual comparisons over strong baselines, which highlight the effectiveness of powerful generative priors for neural ISP under extremely low-light environments. The project page is available at https://csqiangwen.github.io/projects/ldm-isp/		Code Link
Beneath the Surface: The Role of Underwater Image Enhancement in Object Detection	2025-04-18	Show Underwater imagery often suffers from severe degradation resulting in low visual quality and reduced object detection performance. This work aims to evaluate state-of-the-art image enhancement models, investigate their effects on underwater object detection, and explore their potential to improve detection performance. To this end, we apply nine recent underwater image enhancement models, covering physical, non-physical and learning-based categories, to two recent underwater image datasets. Following this, we conduct joint qualitative and quantitative analyses on the original and enhanced images, revealing the discrepancy between the two analyses, and analyzing changes in the quality distribution of the images after enhancement. We then train three recent object detection models on the original datasets, selecting the best-performing detector for further analysis. This detector is subsequently re-trained on the enhanced datasets to evaluate changes in detection performance, highlighting the adverse effect of enhancement on detection performance at the dataset level. Next, we perform a correlation study to examine the relationship between various enhancement metrics and the mean Average Precision (mAP). Finally, we conduct an image-level analysis that reveals images of improved detection performance after enhancement. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of image enhancement to improve detection performance and provide valuable insights for researchers to further explore the effects of enhancement on detection at the individual image level, rather than at the dataset level. This could enable the selective application of enhancement for improved detection. The data generated, code developed, and supplementary materials are publicly available at: https://github.com/RSSL-MTU/Enhancement-Detection-Analysis.		Code Link
Towards Realistic Low-Light Image Enhancement via ISP Driven Data Modeling	2025-04-16	Show Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently become the leading method for low-light image enhancement (LLIE). However, despite significant progress, their outputs may still exhibit issues such as amplified noise, incorrect white balance, or unnatural enhancements when deployed in real world applications. A key challenge is the lack of diverse, large scale training data that captures the complexities of low-light conditions and imaging pipelines. In this paper, we propose a novel image signal processing (ISP) driven data synthesis pipeline that addresses these challenges by generating unlimited paired training data. Specifically, our pipeline begins with easily collected high-quality normal-light images, which are first unprocessed into the RAW format using a reverse ISP. We then synthesize low-light degradations directly in the RAW domain. The resulting data is subsequently processed through a series of ISP stages, including white balance adjustment, color space conversion, tone mapping, and gamma correction, with controlled variations introduced at each stage. This broadens the degradation space and enhances the diversity of the training data, enabling the generated data to capture a wide range of degradations and the complexities inherent in the ISP pipeline. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic pipeline, we conduct extensive experiments using a vanilla UNet model consisting solely of convolutional layers, group normalization, GeLU activation, and convolutional block attention modules (CBAMs). Extensive testing across multiple datasets reveals that the vanilla UNet model trained with our data synthesis pipeline delivers high fidelity, visually appealing enhancement results, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.	17 pa... 17 pages, 11 tables, 10 figures	None
Learning Physics-Informed Color-Aware Transforms for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-16	Show Image decomposition offers deep insights into the imaging factors of visual data and significantly enhances various advanced computer vision tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to low-light image enhancement based on decomposed physics-informed priors. Existing methods that directly map low-light to normal-light images in the sRGB color space suffer from inconsistent color predictions and high sensitivity to spectral power distribution (SPD) variations, resulting in unstable performance under diverse lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce a Physics-informed Color-aware Transform (PiCat), a learning-based framework that converts low-light images from the sRGB color space into deep illumination-invariant descriptors via our proposed Color-aware Transform (CAT). This transformation enables robust handling of complex lighting and SPD variations. Complementing this, we propose the Content-Noise Decomposition Network (CNDN), which refines the descriptor distributions to better align with well-lit conditions by mitigating noise and other distortions, thereby effectively restoring content representations to low-light images. The CAT and the CNDN collectively act as a physical prior, guiding the transformation process from low-light to normal-light domains. Our proposed PiCat framework demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods across five benchmark datasets.	Accep... Accepted by ICME 2025	None
UKDM: Underwater keypoint detection and matching using underwater image enhancement techniques	2025-04-15	Show The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of underwater image enhancement techniques to improve keypoint detection and matching. By applying advanced deep learning models, including generative adversarial networks and convolutional neural networks, we aim to find the best method which improves the accuracy of keypoint detection and the robustness of matching algorithms. We evaluate the performance of these techniques on various underwater datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over traditional methods.		None
AgentPolyp: Accurate Polyp Segmentation via Image Enhancement Agent	2025-04-15	Show Since human and environmental factors interfere, captured polyp images usually suffer from issues such as dim lighting, blur, and overexposure, which pose challenges for downstream polyp segmentation tasks. To address the challenges of noise-induced degradation in polyp images, we present AgentPolyp, a novel framework integrating CLIP-based semantic guidance and dynamic image enhancement with a lightweight neural network for segmentation. The agent first evaluates image quality using CLIP-driven semantic analysis (e.g., identifying ``low-contrast polyps with vascular textures") and adapts reinforcement learning strategies to dynamically apply multi-modal enhancement operations (e.g., denoising, contrast adjustment). A quality assessment feedback loop optimizes pixel-level enhancement and segmentation focus in a collaborative manner, ensuring robust preprocessing before neural network segmentation. This modular architecture supports plug-and-play extensions for various enhancement algorithms and segmentation networks, meeting deployment requirements for endoscopic devices.		None
Multimodal Representation Learning Techniques for Comprehensive Facial State Analysis	2025-04-14	Show Multimodal foundation models have significantly improved feature representation by integrating information from multiple modalities, making them highly suitable for a broader set of applications. However, the exploration of multimodal facial representation for understanding perception has been limited. Understanding and analyzing facial states, such as Action Units (AUs) and emotions, require a comprehensive and robust framework that bridges visual and linguistic modalities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive pipeline for multimodal facial state analysis. First, we compile a new Multimodal Face Dataset (MFA) by generating detailed multilevel language descriptions of face, incorporating Action Unit (AU) and emotion descriptions, by leveraging GPT-4o. Second, we introduce a novel Multilevel Multimodal Face Foundation model (MF^2) tailored for Action Unit (AU) and emotion recognition. Our model incorporates comprehensive visual feature modeling at both local and global levels of face image, enhancing its ability to represent detailed facial appearances. This design aligns visual representations with structured AU and emotion descriptions, ensuring effective cross-modal integration. Third, we develop a Decoupled Fine-Tuning Network (DFN) that efficiently adapts MF^2 across various tasks and datasets. This approach not only reduces computational overhead but also broadens the applicability of the foundation model to diverse scenarios. Experimentation show superior performance for AU and emotion detection tasks.	Accepted by ICME2025	None
Learning to Harmonize Cross-vendor X-ray Images by Non-linear Image Dynamics Correction	2025-04-14	Show In this paper, we explore how conventional image enhancement can improve model robustness in medical image analysis. By applying commonly used normalization methods to images from various vendors and studying their influence on model generalization in transfer learning, we show that the nonlinear characteristics of domain-specific image dynamics cannot be addressed by simple linear transforms. To tackle this issue, we reformulate the image harmonization task as an exposure correction problem and propose a method termed Global Deep Curve Estimation (GDCE) to reduce domain-specific exposure mismatch. GDCE performs enhancement via a pre-defined polynomial function and is trained with the help of a ``domain discriminator'', aiming to improve model transparency in downstream tasks compared to existing black-box methods.		None
Low-Light Image Enhancement using Event-Based Illumination Estimation	2025-04-13	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to improve the visibility of images captured in poorly lit environments. Prevalent event-based solutions primarily utilize events triggered by motion, i.e., ''motion events'' to strengthen only the edge texture, while leaving the high dynamic range and excellent low-light responsiveness of event cameras largely unexplored. This paper instead opens a new avenue from the perspective of estimating the illumination using ''temporal-mapping'' events, i.e., by converting the timestamps of events triggered by a transmittance modulation into brightness values. The resulting fine-grained illumination cues facilitate a more effective decomposition and enhancement of the reflectance component in low-light images through the proposed Illumination-aided Reflectance Enhancement module. Furthermore, the degradation model of temporal-mapping events under low-light condition is investigated for realistic training data synthesizing. To address the lack of datasets under this regime, we construct a beam-splitter setup and collect EvLowLight dataset that includes images, temporal-mapping events, and motion events. Extensive experiments across 5 synthetic datasets and our real-world EvLowLight dataset substantiate that the devised pipeline, dubbed RetinEV, excels in producing well-illuminated, high dynamic range images, outperforming previous state-of-the-art event-based methods by up to 6.62 dB, while maintaining an efficient inference speed of 35.6 frame-per-second on a 640X480 image.		None
Nonlocal Retinex-Based Variational Model and its Deep Unfolding Twin for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-10	Show Images captured under low-light conditions present significant limitations in many applications, as poor lighting can obscure details, reduce contrast, and hide noise. Removing the illumination effects and enhancing the quality of such images is crucial for many tasks, such as image segmentation and object detection. In this paper, we propose a variational method for low-light image enhancement based on the Retinex decomposition into illumination, reflectance, and noise components. A color correction pre-processing step is applied to the low-light image, which is then used as the observed input in the decomposition. Moreover, our model integrates a novel nonlocal gradient-type fidelity term designed to preserve structural details. Additionally, we propose an automatic gamma correction module. Building on the proposed variational approach, we extend the model by introducing its deep unfolding counterpart, in which the proximal operators are replaced with learnable networks. We propose cross-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies in both the nonlocal prior of the reflectance and the nonlocal gradient-based constraint. Experimental results demonstrate that both methods compare favorably with several recent and state-of-the-art techniques across different datasets. In particular, despite not relying on learning strategies, the variational model outperforms most deep learning approaches both visually and in terms of quality metrics.		None
Synthetic CT Generation from Time-of-Flight Non-Attenutaion-Corrected PET for Whole-Body PET Attenuation Correction	2025-04-10	Show Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging requires accurate attenuation correction (AC) to account for photon loss due to tissue density variations. In PET/MR systems, computed tomography (CT), which offers a straightforward estimation of AC is not available. This study presents a deep learning approach to generate synthetic CT (sCT) images directly from Time-of-Flight (TOF) non-attenuation corrected (NAC) PET images, enhancing AC for PET/MR. We first evaluated models pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets for a CT-to-CT reconstruction task, finding that the pre-trained model outperformed those trained solely on medical datasets. The pre-trained model was then fine-tuned using an institutional dataset of 35 TOF NAC PET and CT volume pairs, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) of 74.49 HU and highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 28.66 dB within the body contour region. Visual assessments demonstrated improved reconstruction of both bone and soft tissue structures from TOF NAC PET images. This work highlights the effectiveness of using pre-trained deep learning models for medical image translation tasks. Future work will assess the impact of sCT on PET attenuation correction and explore additional neural network architectures and datasets to further enhance performance and practical applications in PET imaging.	4 pag... 4 pages, 2 figures, ISBI 2025	None
Lumina-OmniLV: A Unified Multimodal Framework for General Low-Level Vision	2025-04-08	Show We present Lunima-OmniLV (abbreviated as OmniLV), a universal multimodal multi-task framework for low-level vision that addresses over 100 sub-tasks across four major categories: image restoration, image enhancement, weak-semantic dense prediction, and stylization. OmniLV leverages both textual and visual prompts to offer flexible and user-friendly interactions. Built on Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based generative priors, our framework supports arbitrary resolutions -- achieving optimal performance at 1K resolution -- while preserving fine-grained details and high fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that separately encoding text and visual instructions, combined with co-training using shallow feature control, is essential to mitigate task ambiguity and enhance multi-task generalization. Our findings also reveal that integrating high-level generative tasks into low-level vision models can compromise detail-sensitive restoration. These insights pave the way for more robust and generalizable low-level vision systems.		None
Balancing Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation for Unified Image Fusion	2025-04-07	Show Unified image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multi-source images, enhancing image quality through a unified framework applicable to diverse fusion tasks. While treating all fusion tasks as a unified problem facilitates task-invariant knowledge sharing, it often overlooks task-specific characteristics, thereby limiting the overall performance. Existing general image fusion methods incorporate explicit task identification to enable adaptation to different fusion tasks. However, this dependence during inference restricts the model's generalization to unseen fusion tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified image fusion framework named "TITA", which dynamically balances both Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation. For task-invariant interaction, we introduce the Interaction-enhanced Pixel Attention (IPA) module to enhance pixel-wise interactions for better multi-source complementary information extraction. For task-specific adaptation, the Operation-based Adaptive Fusion (OAF) module dynamically adjusts operation weights based on task properties. Additionally, we incorporate the Fast Adaptive Multitask Optimization (FAMO) strategy to mitigate the impact of gradient conflicts across tasks during joint training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TITA not only achieves competitive performance compared to specialized methods across three image fusion scenarios but also exhibits strong generalization to unseen fusion tasks.		None
Inland Waterway Object Detection in Multi-environment: Dataset and Approach	2025-04-07	Show The success of deep learning in intelligent ship visual perception relies heavily on rich image data. However, dedicated datasets for inland waterway vessels remain scarce, limiting the adaptability of visual perception systems in complex environments. Inland waterways, characterized by narrow channels, variable weather, and urban interference, pose significant challenges to object detection systems based on existing datasets. To address these issues, this paper introduces the Multi-environment Inland Waterway Vessel Dataset (MEIWVD), comprising 32,478 high-quality images from diverse scenarios, including sunny, rainy, foggy, and artificial lighting conditions. MEIWVD covers common vessel types in the Yangtze River Basin, emphasizing diversity, sample independence, environmental complexity, and multi-scale characteristics, making it a robust benchmark for vessel detection. Leveraging MEIWVD, this paper proposes a scene-guided image enhancement module to improve water surface images based on environmental conditions adaptively. Additionally, a parameter-limited dilated convolution enhances the representation of vessel features, while a multi-scale dilated residual fusion method integrates multi-scale features for better detection. Experiments show that MEIWVD provides a more rigorous benchmark for object detection algorithms, and the proposed methods significantly improve detector performance, especially in complex multi-environment scenarios.	37 pa... 37 pages,11 figures,5 tables	None
LUIEO: A Lightweight Model for Integrating Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection	2025-04-06	Show Underwater optical images inevitably suffer from various degradation factors such as blurring, low contrast, and color distortion, which hinder the accuracy of object detection tasks. Due to the lack of paired underwater/clean images, most research methods adopt a strategy of first enhancing and then detecting, resulting in a lack of feature communication between the two learning tasks. On the other hand, due to the contradiction between the diverse degradation factors of underwater images and the limited number of samples, existing underwater enhancement methods are difficult to effectively enhance degraded images of unknown water bodies, thereby limiting the improvement of object detection accuracy. Therefore, most underwater target detection results are still displayed on degraded images, making it difficult to visually judge the correctness of the detection results. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a multi-task learning method that simultaneously enhances underwater images and improves detection accuracy. Compared with single-task learning, the integrated model allows for the dynamic adjustment of information communication and sharing between different tasks. Due to the fact that real underwater images can only provide annotated object labels, this paper introduces physical constraints to ensure that object detection tasks do not interfere with image enhancement tasks. Therefore, this article introduces a physical module to decompose underwater images into clean images, background light, and transmission images and uses a physical model to calculate underwater images for self-supervision. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves satisfactory results in visual performance, object detection accuracy, and detection efficiency compared to state-of-the-art comparative methods.		None
RCNet: Deep Recurrent Collaborative Network for Multi-View Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-05	Show Scene observation from multiple perspectives would bring a more comprehensive visual experience. However, in the context of acquiring multiple views in the dark, the highly correlated views are seriously alienated, making it challenging to improve scene understanding with auxiliary views. Recent single image-based enhancement methods may not be able to provide consistently desirable restoration performance for all views due to the ignorance of potential feature correspondence among different views. To alleviate this issue, we make the first attempt to investigate multi-view low-light image enhancement. First, we construct a new dataset called Multi-View Low-light Triplets (MVLT), including 1,860 pairs of triple images with large illumination ranges and wide noise distribution. Each triplet is equipped with three different viewpoints towards the same scene. Second, we propose a deep multi-view enhancement framework based on the Recurrent Collaborative Network (RCNet). Specifically, in order to benefit from similar texture correspondence across different views, we design the recurrent feature enhancement, alignment and fusion (ReEAF) module, in which intra-view feature enhancement (Intra-view EN) followed by inter-view feature alignment and fusion (Inter-view AF) is performed to model the intra-view and inter-view feature propagation sequentially via multi-view collaboration. In addition, two different modules from enhancement to alignment (E2A) and from alignment to enhancement (A2E) are developed to enable the interactions between Intra-view EN and Inter-view AF, which explicitly utilize attentive feature weighting and sampling for enhancement and alignment, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our RCNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. All of our dataset, code, and model will be available at https://github.com/hluo29/RCNet.	Accep... Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)	Code Link
A GAN-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Rooftop Detection from Historical Aerial Imagery	2025-04-03	Show Precise detection of rooftops from historical aerial imagery is essential for analyzing long-term urban development and human settlement patterns. Nonetheless, black-and-white analog photographs present considerable challenges for modern object detection frameworks due to their limited spatial resolution, absence of color information, and archival degradation. To address these challenges, this research introduces a two-stage image enhancement pipeline based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): image colorization utilizing DeOldify, followed by super-resolution enhancement with Real-ESRGAN. The enhanced images were subsequently employed to train and evaluate rooftop detection models, including Faster R-CNN, DETReg, and YOLOv11n. The results demonstrate that the combination of colorization with super-resolution significantly enhances detection performance, with YOLOv11n achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) exceeding 85%. This signifies an enhancement of approximately 40% over the original black-and-white images and 20% over images enhanced solely through colorization. The proposed method effectively bridges the gap between archival imagery and contemporary deep learning techniques, facilitating more reliable extraction of building footprints from historical aerial photographs. Code and resources for reproducing our results are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Pengyu-gis/Historical-Aerial-Photos}{github.com/Pengyu-gis/Historical-Aerial-Photos}.		Code Link
Noise Calibration and Spatial-Frequency Interactive Network for STEM Image Enhancement	2025-04-03	Show Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) enables the observation of atomic arrangements at sub-angstrom resolution, allowing for atomically resolved analysis of the physical and chemical properties of materials. However, due to the effects of noise, electron beam damage, sample thickness, etc, obtaining satisfactory atomic-level images is often challenging. Enhancing STEM images can reveal clearer structural details of materials. Nonetheless, existing STEM image enhancement methods usually overlook unique features in the frequency domain, and existing datasets lack realism and generality. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we develop noise calibration, data synthesis, and enhancement methods for STEM images. We first present a STEM noise calibration method, which is used to synthesize more realistic STEM images. The parameters of background noise, scan noise, and pointwise noise are obtained by statistical analysis and fitting of real STEM images containing atoms. Then we use these parameters to develop a more general dataset that considers both regular and random atomic arrangements and includes both HAADF and BF mode images. Finally, we design a spatial-frequency interactive network for STEM image enhancement, which can explore the information in the frequency domain formed by the periodicity of atomic arrangement. Experimental results show that our data is closer to real STEM images and achieves better enhancement performances together with our network. Code will be available at https://github.com/HeasonLee/SFIN}{https://github.com/HeasonLee/SFIN.	Acceped by CVPR2025	Code Link
HPGN: Hybrid Priors-Guided Network for Compressed Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-03	Show In practical applications, conventional methods generate large volumes of low-light images that require compression for efficient storage and transmission. However, most existing methods either disregard the removal of potential compression artifacts during the enhancement process or fail to establish a unified framework for joint task enhancement of images with varying compression qualities. To solve this problem, we propose the hybrid priors-guided network (HPGN), which enhances compressed low-light images by integrating both compression and illumination priors. Our approach fully utilizes the JPEG quality factor (QF) and DCT quantization matrix (QM) to guide the design of efficient joint task plug-and-play modules. Additionally, we employ a random QF generation strategy to guide model training, enabling a single model to enhance images across different compression levels. Experimental results confirm the superiority of our proposed method.	7 pages, 5 figures	None
Brightness Perceiving for Recursive Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-04-03	Show Due to the wide dynamic range in real low-light scenes, there will be large differences in the degree of contrast degradation and detail blurring of captured images, making it difficult for existing end-to-end methods to enhance low-light images to normal exposure. To address the above issue, we decompose low-light image enhancement into a recursive enhancement task and propose a brightness-perceiving-based recursive enhancement framework for high dynamic range low-light image enhancement. Specifically, our recursive enhancement framework consists of two parallel sub-networks: Adaptive Contrast and Texture enhancement network (ACT-Net) and Brightness Perception network (BP-Net). The ACT-Net is proposed to adaptively enhance image contrast and details under the guidance of the brightness adjustment branch and gradient adjustment branch, which are proposed to perceive the degradation degree of contrast and details in low-light images. To adaptively enhance images captured under different brightness levels, BP-Net is proposed to control the recursive enhancement times of ACT-Net by exploring the image brightness distribution properties. Finally, in order to coordinate ACT-Net and BP-Net, we design a novel unsupervised training strategy to facilitate the training procedure. To further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we construct a new dataset with a broader brightness distribution by mixing three low-light datasets. Compared with eleven existing representative methods, the proposed method achieves new SOTA performance on six reference and no reference metrics. Specifically, the proposed method improves the PSNR by 0.9 dB compared to the existing SOTA method.		None
SemiISP/SemiIE: Semi-Supervised Image Signal Processor and Image Enhancement Leveraging One-to-Many Mapping sRGB-to-RAW	2025-04-03	Show DNN-based methods have been successful in Image Signal Processor (ISP) and image enhancement (IE) tasks. However, the cost of creating training data for these tasks is considerably higher than for other tasks, making it difficult to prepare large-scale datasets. Also, creating personalized ISP and IE with minimal training data can lead to new value streams since preferred image quality varies depending on the person and use case. While semi-supervised learning could be a potential solution in such cases, it has rarely been utilized for these tasks. In this paper, we realize semi-supervised learning for ISP and IE leveraging a RAW image reconstruction (sRGB-to-RAW) method. Although existing sRGB-to-RAW methods can generate pseudo-RAW image datasets that improve the accuracy of RAW-based high-level computer vision tasks such as object detection, their quality is not sufficient for ISP and IE tasks that require precise image quality definition. Therefore, we also propose a sRGB-to-RAW method that can improve the image quality of these tasks. The proposed semi-supervised learning with the proposed sRGB-to-RAW method successfully improves the image quality of various models on various datasets.		None
3D Dental Model Segmentation with Geometrical Boundary Preserving	2025-03-31	Show 3D intraoral scan mesh is widely used in digital dentistry diagnosis, segmenting 3D intraoral scan mesh is a critical preliminary task. Numerous approaches have been devised for precise tooth segmentation. Currently, the deep learning-based methods are capable of the high accuracy segmentation of crown. However, the segmentation accuracy at the junction between the crown and the gum is still below average. Existing down-sampling methods are unable to effectively preserve the geometric details at the junction. To address these problems, we propose CrossTooth, a boundary-preserving segmentation method that combines 3D mesh selective downsampling to retain more vertices at the tooth-gingiva area, along with cross-modal discriminative boundary features extracted from multi-view rendered images, enhancing the geometric representation of the segmentation network. Using a point network as a backbone and incorporating image complementary features, CrossTooth significantly improves segmentation accuracy, as demonstrated by experiments on a public intraoral scan dataset.	The I... The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025	None
Underwater Image Enhancement by Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks	2025-03-26	Show Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is fundamental for marine applications, including autonomous vision-based navigation. Deep learning methods using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers advanced UIE performance. Recently, spiking neural networks (SNN) have gained attention for their lightweight design, energy efficiency, and scalability. This paper introduces UIE-SNN, the first SNN-based UIE algorithm to improve visibility of underwater images. UIE-SNN is a 19- layered convolutional spiking encoder-decoder framework with skip connections, directly trained using surrogate gradient-based backpropagation through time (BPTT) strategy. We explore and validate the influence of training datasets on energy reduction, a unique advantage of UIE-SNN architecture, in contrast to the conventional learning-based architectures, where energy consumption is model-dependent. UIE-SNN optimizes the loss function in latent space representation to reconstruct clear underwater images. Our algorithm performs on par with its non-spiking counterpart methods in terms of PSNR and structural similarity index (SSIM) at reduced timesteps ($T=5$) and energy consumption of $85%$. The algorithm is trained on two publicly available benchmark datasets, UIEB and EUVP, and tested on unseen images from UIEB, EUVP, LSUI, U45, and our custom UIE dataset. The UIE-SNN algorithm achieves PSNR of (17.7801dB) and SSIM of (0.7454) on UIEB, and PSNR of (23.1725dB) and SSIM of (0.7890) on EUVP. UIE-SNN achieves this algorithmic performance with fewer operators ((147.49) GSOPs) and energy ((0.1327J)) compared to its non-spiking counterpart (GFLOPs = (218.88) and Energy=(1.0068J)). Compared with existing SOTA UIE methods, UIE-SNN achieves an average of (6.5\times) improvement in energy efficiency. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/vidya-rejul/UIE-SNN.git}{UIE-SNN}.		Code Link
GM-MoE: Low-Light Enhancement with Gated-Mechanism Mixture-of-Experts	2025-03-26	Show Low-light enhancement has wide applications in autonomous driving, 3D reconstruction, remote sensing, surveillance, and so on, which can significantly improve information utilization. However, most existing methods lack generalization and are limited to specific tasks such as image recovery. To address these issues, we propose Gated-Mechanism Mixture-of-Experts (GM-MoE), the first framework to introduce a mixture-of-experts network for low-light image enhancement. GM-MoE comprises a dynamic gated weight conditioning network and three sub-expert networks, each specializing in a distinct enhancement task. Combining a self-designed gated mechanism that dynamically adjusts the weights of the sub-expert networks for different data domains. Additionally, we integrate local and global feature fusion within sub-expert networks to enhance image quality by capturing multi-scale features. Experimental results demonstrate that the GM-MoE achieves superior generalization with respect to 25 compared approaches, reaching state-of-the-art performance on PSNR on 5 benchmarks and SSIM on 4 benchmarks, respectively.		None
LENVIZ: A High-Resolution Low-Exposure Night Vision Benchmark Dataset	2025-03-25	Show Low-light image enhancement is crucial for a myriad of applications, from night vision and surveillance, to autonomous driving. However, due to the inherent limitations that come in hand with capturing images in low-illumination environments, the task of enhancing such scenes still presents a formidable challenge. To advance research in this field, we introduce our Low Exposure Night Vision (LENVIZ) Dataset, a comprehensive multi-exposure benchmark dataset for low-light image enhancement comprising of over 230K frames showcasing 24K real-world indoor and outdoor, with-and without human, scenes. Captured using 3 different camera sensors, LENVIZ offers a wide range of lighting conditions, noise levels, and scene complexities, making it the largest publicly available up-to 4K resolution benchmark in the field. LENVIZ includes high quality human-generated ground truth, for which each multi-exposure low-light scene has been meticulously curated and edited by expert photographers to ensure optimal image quality. Furthermore, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis of current state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement techniques on our dataset and highlight potential areas of improvement.	Datas... Dataset will be released upon publication	None
LLGS: Unsupervised Gaussian Splatting for Image Enhancement and Reconstruction in Pure Dark Environment	2025-03-24	Show 3D Gaussian Splatting has shown remarkable capabilities in novel view rendering tasks and exhibits significant potential for multi-view optimization.However, the original 3D Gaussian Splatting lacks color representation for inputs in low-light environments. Simply using enhanced images as inputs would lead to issues with multi-view consistency, and current single-view enhancement systems rely on pre-trained data, lacking scene generalization. These problems limit the application of 3D Gaussian Splatting in low-light conditions in the field of robotics, including high-fidelity modeling and feature matching. To address these challenges, we propose an unsupervised multi-view stereoscopic system based on Gaussian Splatting, called Low-Light Gaussian Splatting (LLGS). This system aims to enhance images in low-light environments while reconstructing the scene. Our method introduces a decomposable Gaussian representation called M-Color, which separately characterizes color information for targeted enhancement. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised optimization method with zero-knowledge priors, using direction-based enhancement to ensure multi-view consistency. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both low-light enhancement and 3D Gaussian Splatting.		None
Zero-Shot Low Light Image Enhancement with Diffusion Prior	2025-03-24	Show In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective "free lunch" solution for low-light image enhancement (LLIE), which aims to restore low-light images as if acquired in well-illuminated environments. Our method necessitates no optimization, training, fine-tuning, text conditioning, or hyperparameter adjustments, yet it consistently reconstructs low-light images with superior fidelity. Specifically, we leverage a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion prior, learned from training on a large collection of natural images, and the features present in the model itself to guide the inference, in contrast to existing methods that depend on customized constraints. Comprehensive quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms SOTA methods on established datasets, while qualitative analyses indicate enhanced color accuracy and the rectification of subtle chromatic deviations. Furthermore, additional experiments reveal that our method, without any modifications, achieves SOTA-comparable performance in the auto white balance (AWB) task.		None
Cross-Domain Underwater Image Enhancement Guided by No-Reference Image Quality Assessment: A Transfer Learning Approach	2025-03-23	Show Single underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a challenging ill-posed problem, but its development is hindered by two major issues: (1) The labels in underwater reference datasets are pseudo labels, relying on these pseudo ground truths in supervised learning leads to domain discrepancy. (2) Underwater reference datasets are scarce, making training on such small datasets prone to overfitting and distribution shift. To address these challenges, we propose Trans-UIE, a transfer learning-based UIE model that captures the fundamental paradigms of UIE through pretraining and utilizes a dataset composed of both reference and non-reference datasets for fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning the model using only reconstruction loss may introduce confirmation bias. To mitigate this, our method leverages no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) metrics from above-water scenes to guide the transfer learning process across domains while generating enhanced images with the style of the above-water image domain. Additionally, to reduce the risk of overfitting during the pretraining stage, we introduce Pearson correlation loss. Experimental results on both full-reference and no-reference underwater benchmark datasets demonstrate that Trans-UIE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.		None
MERLION: Marine ExploRation with Language guIded Online iNformative Visual Sampling and Enhancement	2025-03-22	Show Autonomous and targeted underwater visual monitoring and exploration using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can be a challenging task due to both online and offline constraints. The online constraints comprise limited onboard storage capacity and communication bandwidth to the surface, whereas the offline constraints entail the time and effort required for the selection of desired key frames from the video data. An example use case of targeted underwater visual monitoring is finding the most interesting visual frames of fish in a long sequence of an AUV's visual experience. This challenge of targeted informative sampling is further aggravated in murky waters with poor visibility. In this paper, we present MERLION, a novel framework that provides semantically aligned and visually enhanced summaries for murky underwater marine environment monitoring and exploration. Specifically, our framework integrates (a) an image-text model for semantically aligning the visual samples to the users' needs, (b) an image enhancement model for murky water visual data and (c) an informative sampler for summarizing the monitoring experience. We validate our proposed MERLION framework on real-world data with user studies and present qualitative and quantitative results using our evaluation metric and show improved results compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. We have open-sourced the code for MERLION at the following link https://github.com/MARVL-Lab/MERLION.git.	In pr... In proceedings of IEEE ICRA 2025	Code Link
DLEN: Dual Branch of Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement in Dual Domains	2025-03-21	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLE) aims to improve the visual quality of images captured in poorly lit conditions, which often suffer from low brightness, low contrast, noise, and color distortions. These issues hinder the performance of computer vision tasks such as object detection, facial recognition, and autonomous driving.Traditional enhancement techniques, such as multi-scale fusion and histogram equalization, fail to preserve fine details and often struggle with maintaining the natural appearance of enhanced images under complex lighting conditions. Although the Retinex theory provides a foundation for image decomposition, it often amplifies noise, leading to suboptimal image quality. In this paper, we propose the Dual Light Enhance Network (DLEN), a novel architecture that incorporates two distinct attention mechanisms, considering both spatial and frequency domains. Our model introduces a learnable wavelet transform module in the illumination estimation phase, preserving high- and low-frequency components to enhance edge and texture details. Additionally, we design a dual-branch structure that leverages the power of the Transformer architecture to enhance both the illumination and structural components of the image.Through extensive experiments, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks.Code is available here: https://github.com/LaLaLoXX/DLEN	9 pag... 9 pages and 6 figures	Code Link
Toward Generalized Image Quality Assessment: Relaxing the Perfect Reference Quality Assumption	2025-03-19	Show Full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) generally assumes that reference images are of perfect quality. However, this assumption is flawed due to the sensor and optical limitations of modern imaging systems. Moreover, recent generative enhancement methods are capable of producing images of higher quality than their original. All of these challenge the effectiveness and applicability of current FR-IQA models. To relax the assumption of perfect reference image quality, we build a large-scale IQA database, namely DiffIQA, containing approximately 180,000 images generated by a diffusion-based image enhancer with adjustable hyper-parameters. Each image is annotated by human subjects as either worse, similar, or better quality compared to its reference. Building on this, we present a generalized FR-IQA model, namely Adaptive Fidelity-Naturalness Evaluator (A-FINE), to accurately assess and adaptively combine the fidelity and naturalness of a test image. A-FINE aligns well with standard FR-IQA when the reference image is much more natural than the test image. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that A-FINE surpasses standard FR-IQA models on well-established IQA datasets and our newly created DiffIQA. To further validate A-FINE, we additionally construct a super-resolution IQA benchmark (SRIQA-Bench), encompassing test images derived from ten state-of-the-art SR methods with reliable human quality annotations. Tests on SRIQA-Bench re-affirm the advantages of A-FINE. The code and dataset are available at https://tianhewu.github.io/A-FINE-page.github.io/.	Accep... Accepted by CVPR 2025	Code Link
SINET: Sparsity-driven Interpretable Neural Network for Underwater Image Enhancement	2025-03-16	Show Improving the quality of underwater images is essential for advancing marine research and technology. This work introduces a sparsity-driven interpretable neural network (SINET) for the underwater image enhancement (UIE) task. Unlike pure deep learning methods, our network architecture is based on a novel channel-specific convolutional sparse coding (CCSC) model, ensuring good interpretability of the underlying image enhancement process. The key feature of SINET is that it estimates the salient features from the three color channels using three sparse feature estimation blocks (SFEBs). The architecture of SFEB is designed by unrolling an iterative algorithm for solving the $\ell_1$ regularized convolutional sparse coding (CSC) problem. Our experiments show that SINET surpasses state-of-the-art PSNR value by $1.05$ dB with $3873$ times lower computational complexity. Code can be found at: https://github.com/gargi884/SINET-UIE/tree/main.	ICASSP 2025	Code Link
CARNet: Collaborative Adversarial Resilience for Robust Underwater Image Enhancement and Perception	2025-03-16	Show Due to the uneven absorption of different light wavelengths in aquatic environments, underwater images suffer from low visibility and clear color deviations. With the advancement of autonomous underwater vehicles, extensive research has been conducted on learning-based underwater enhancement algorithms. These works can generate visually pleasing enhanced images and mitigate the adverse effects of degraded images on subsequent perception tasks. However, learning-based methods are susceptible to the inherent fragility of adversarial attacks, causing significant disruption in enhanced results. In this work, we introduce a collaborative adversarial resilience network, dubbed CARNet, for underwater image enhancement and subsequent detection tasks. Concretely, we first introduce an invertible network with strong perturbation-perceptual abilities to isolate attacks from underwater images, preventing interference with visual quality enhancement and perceptual tasks. Furthermore, an attack pattern discriminator is introduced to adaptively identify and eliminate various types of attacks. Additionally, we propose a bilevel attack optimization strategy to heighten the robustness of the network against different types of attacks under the collaborative adversarial training of vision-driven and perception-driven attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outputs visually appealing enhancement images and performs an average 6.71% higher detection mAP than state-of-the-art methods.	13 pages, 13 figures	None
DPF-Net: Physical Imaging Model Embedded Data-Driven Underwater Image Enhancement	2025-03-16	Show Due to the complex interplay of light absorption and scattering in the underwater environment, underwater images experience significant degradation. This research presents a two-stage underwater image enhancement network called the Data-Driven and Physical Parameters Fusion Network (DPF-Net), which harnesses the robustness of physical imaging models alongside the generality and efficiency of data-driven methods. We first train a physical parameter estimate module using synthetic datasets to guarantee the trustworthiness of the physical parameters, rather than solely learning the fitting relationship between raw and reference images by the application of the imaging equation, as is common in prior studies. This module is subsequently trained in conjunction with an enhancement network, where the estimated physical parameters are integrated into a data-driven model within the embedding space. To maintain the uniformity of the restoration process amid underwater imaging degradation, we propose a physics-based degradation consistency loss. Additionally, we suggest an innovative weak reference loss term utilizing the entire dataset, which alleviates our model's reliance on the quality of individual reference images. Our proposed DPF-Net demonstrates superior performance compared to other benchmark methods across multiple test sets, achieving state-of-the-art results. The source code and pre-trained models are available on the project home page: https://github.com/OUCVisionGroup/DPF-Net.		Code Link
DPEC: Dual-Path Error Compensation Method for Enhanced Low-Light Image Clarity	2025-03-15	Show For the task of low-light image enhancement, deep learning-based algorithms have demonstrated superiority and effectiveness compared to traditional methods. However, these methods, primarily based on Retinex theory, tend to overlook the noise and color distortions in input images, leading to significant noise amplification and local color distortions in enhanced results. To address these issues, we propose the Dual-Path Error Compensation (DPEC) method, designed to improve image quality under low-light conditions by preserving local texture details while restoring global image brightness without amplifying noise. DPEC incorporates precise pixel-level error estimation to capture subtle differences and an independent denoising mechanism to prevent noise amplification. We introduce the HIS-Retinex loss to guide DPEC's training, ensuring the brightness distribution of enhanced images closely aligns with real-world conditions. To balance computational speed and resource efficiency while training DPEC for a comprehensive understanding of the global context, we integrated the VMamba architecture into its backbone. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in low-light image enhancement. The code is publicly available online at https://github.com/wangshuang233/DPEC.		Code Link
Enhanced Low-Dose CT Image Reconstruction by Domain and Task Shifting Gaussian Denoisers	2025-03-14	Show Computed tomography from a low radiation dose (LDCT) is challenging due to high noise in the projection data. Popular approaches for LDCT image reconstruction are two-stage methods, typically consisting of the filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithm followed by a neural network for LDCT image enhancement. Two-stage methods are attractive for their simplicity and potential for computational efficiency, typically requiring only a single FBP and a neural network forward pass for inference. However, the best reconstruction quality is currently achieved by unrolled iterative methods (Learned Primal-Dual and ItNet), which are more complex and thus have a higher computational cost for training and inference. We propose a method combining the simplicity and efficiency of two-stage methods with state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. Our strategy utilizes a neural network pretrained for Gaussian noise removal from natural grayscale images, fine-tuned for LDCT image enhancement. We call this method FBP-DTSGD (Domain and Task Shifted Gaussian Denoisers) as the fine-tuning is a task shift from Gaussian denoising to enhancing LDCT images and a domain shift from natural grayscale to LDCT images. An ablation study with three different pretrained Gaussian denoisers indicates that the performance of FBP-DTSGD does not depend on a specific denoising architecture, suggesting future advancements in Gaussian denoising could benefit the method. The study also shows that pretraining on natural images enhances LDCT reconstruction quality, especially with limited training data. Notably, pretraining involves no additional cost, as existing pretrained models are used. The proposed method currently holds the top mean position in the LoDoPaB-CT challenge.	24 pages, 5 figures	None
Multi-Knowledge-oriented Nighttime Haze Imaging Enhancer for Vision-driven Intelligent Transportation Systems	2025-03-14	Show Salient object detection (SOD) plays a critical role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), facilitating the detection and segmentation of key visual elements in an image. However, adverse imaging conditions such as haze during the day, low light, and haze at night severely degrade image quality and hinder reliable object detection in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-knowledge-oriented nighttime haze imaging enhancer (MKoIE), which integrates three tasks: daytime dehazing, low-light enhancement, and nighttime dehazing. The MKoIE incorporates two key innovative components: First, the network employs a task-oriented node learning mechanism to handle three specific degradation types: day-time haze, low light, and night-time haze conditions, with an embedded self-attention module enhancing its performance in nighttime imaging. In addition, multi-receptive field enhancement module that efficiently extracts multi-scale features through three parallel depthwise separable convolution branches with different dilation rates, capturing comprehensive spatial information with minimal computational overhead to meet the requirements of real-time ITS deployment. To ensure optimal image reconstruction quality and visual characteristics, we suggest a hybrid loss function. Extensive experiments on different types of weather/imaging conditions illustrate that MKoIE surpasses existing methods, enhancing the reliability, accuracy, and operational efficiency of ITS. The code is available at https://github.com/Ai-Chen-Lab/MKoIE.		Code Link
Dream-IF: Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent for Image Fusion	2025-03-13	Show Image fusion aims to integrate comprehensive information from images acquired through multiple sources. However, images captured by diverse sensors often encounter various degradations that can negatively affect fusion quality. Traditional fusion methods generally treat image enhancement and fusion as separate processes, overlooking the inherent correlation between them; notably, the dominant regions in one modality of a fused image often indicate areas where the other modality might benefit from enhancement. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the concept of dominant regions for image enhancement and present a Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent framework for Image Fusion (Dream-IF). This framework quantifies the relative dominance of each modality across different layers and leverages this information to facilitate reciprocal cross-modal enhancement. By integrating the relative dominance derived from image fusion, our approach supports not only image restoration but also a broader range of image enhancement applications. Furthermore, we employ prompt-based encoding to capture degradation-specific details, which dynamically steer the restoration process and promote coordinated enhancement in both multi-modal image fusion and image enhancement scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Dream-IF consistently outperforms its counterparts.		None
QUIET-SR: Quantum Image Enhancement Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution	2025-03-11	Show Recent advancements in Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) using deep learning have significantly improved image restoration quality. However, the high computational cost of processing high-resolution images due to the large number of parameters in classical models, along with the scalability challenges of quantum algorithms for image processing, remains a major obstacle. In this paper, we propose the Quantum Image Enhancement Transformer for Super-Resolution (QUIET-SR), a hybrid framework that extends the Swin transformer architecture with a novel shifted quantum window attention mechanism, built upon variational quantum neural networks. QUIET-SR effectively captures complex residual mappings between low-resolution and high-resolution images, leveraging quantum attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction and image restoration while requiring a minimal number of qubits, making it suitable for the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. We evaluate our framework in MNIST (30.24 PSNR, 0.989 SSIM), FashionMNIST (29.76 PSNR, 0.976 SSIM) and the MedMNIST dataset collection, demonstrating that QUIET-SR achieves PSNR and SSIM scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods while using fewer parameters. These findings highlight the potential of scalable variational quantum machine learning models for SISR, marking a step toward practical quantum-enhanced image super-resolution.	10 figures, 3 pages	None
PromptLNet: Region-Adaptive Aesthetic Enhancement via Prompt Guidance in Low-Light Enhancement Net	2025-03-11	Show Learning and improving large language models through human preference feedback has become a mainstream approach, but it has rarely been applied to the field of low-light image enhancement. Existing low-light enhancement evaluations typically rely on objective metrics (such as FID, PSNR, etc.), which often result in models that perform well objectively but lack aesthetic quality. Moreover, most low-light enhancement models are primarily designed for global brightening, lacking detailed refinement. Therefore, the generated images often require additional local adjustments, leading to research gaps in practical applications. To bridge this gap, we propose the following innovations: 1) We collect human aesthetic evaluation text pairs and aesthetic scores from multiple low-light image datasets (e.g., LOL, LOL2, LOM, DCIM, MEF, etc.) to train a low-light image aesthetic evaluation model, supplemented by an optimization algorithm designed to fine-tune the diffusion model. 2) We propose a prompt-driven brightness adjustment module capable of performing fine-grained brightness and aesthetic adjustments for specific instances or regions. 3) We evaluate our method alongside existing state-of-the-art algorithms on mainstream benchmarks. Experimental results show that our method not only outperforms traditional methods in terms of visual quality but also provides greater flexibility and controllability, paving the way for improved aesthetic quality.		None
TSCnet: A Text-driven Semantic-level Controllable Framework for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-03-11	Show Deep learning-based image enhancement methods show significant advantages in reducing noise and improving visibility in low-light conditions. These methods are typically based on one-to-one mapping, where the model learns a direct transformation from low light to specific enhanced images. Therefore, these methods are inflexible as they do not allow highly personalized mapping, even though an individual's lighting preferences are inherently personalized. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new light enhancement task and a new framework that provides customized lighting control through prompt-driven, semantic-level, and quantitative brightness adjustments. The framework begins by leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM) to understand natural language prompts, enabling it to identify target objects for brightness adjustments. To localize these target objects, the Retinex-based Reasoning Segment (RRS) module generates precise target localization masks using reflection images. Subsequently, the Text-based Brightness Controllable (TBC) module adjusts brightness levels based on the generated illumination map. Finally, an Adaptive Contextual Compensation (ACC) module integrates multi-modal inputs and controls a conditional diffusion model to adjust the lighting, ensuring seamless and precise enhancements accurately. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate our framework's superior performance at increasing visibility, maintaining natural color balance, and amplifying fine details without creating artifacts. Furthermore, its robust generalization capabilities enable complex semantic-level lighting adjustments in diverse open-world environments through natural language interactions.		None
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Model Attribution Using Learnable Representation From CLIP-ViT Features	2025-03-11	Show Recently, images that distort or fabricate facts using generative models have become a social concern. To cope with continuous evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, model attribution (MA) is necessary beyond just detection of synthetic images. However, current deep learning-based MA methods must be trained from scratch with new data to recognize unseen models, which is time-consuming and data-intensive. This work proposes a new strategy to deal with persistently emerging generative models. We adapt few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) mechanisms for MA problem to uncover novel generative AI models. Unlike existing FSCIL approaches that focus on object classification using high-level information, MA requires analyzing low-level details like color and texture in synthetic images. Thus, we utilize a learnable representation from different levels of CLIP-ViT features. To learn an effective representation, we propose Adaptive Integration Module (AIM) to calculate a weighted sum of CLIP-ViT block features for each image, enhancing the ability to identify generative models. Extensive experiments show our method effectively extends from prior generative models to recent ones.	9 pages	None
Enhancing Prohibited Item Detection through X-ray-Specific Augmentation and Contextual Feature Integration	2025-03-11	Show X-ray prohibited item detection faces challenges due to the long-tail distribution and unique characteristics of X-ray imaging. Traditional data augmentation strategies, such as copy-paste and mixup, are ineffective at improving the detection of rare items due to the complex interactions between overlapping objects. Furthermore, X-ray imaging removes easily distinguishable features like color and texture, making it difficult to differentiate between visually similar categories. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose the X-ray Imaging-driven Detection Network (XIDNet). Inspired by the unique characteristics of X-ray imaging, this network introduces two key innovations: a novel X-ray-specific augmentation strategy that generates more realistic training samples for rare items, thereby improving detection performance for categories with insufficient samples, and an contextual feature integration algorithm that captures the spatial and semantic interactions between objects and surroundings under X-ray imaging, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish between similar categories. Extensive experimental results show that XIDNet effectively leverages X-ray imaging characteristics to significantly improve detection performance, outperforming popular SoTA methods by up to 17.2% in tail categories.	10 pages, 5 figures	None
Deep Perceptual Enhancement for Medical Image Analysis	2025-03-11	Show Due to numerous hardware shortcomings, medical image acquisition devices are susceptible to producing low-quality (i.e., low contrast, inappropriate brightness, noisy, etc.) images. Regrettably, perceptually degraded images directly impact the diagnosis process and make the decision-making manoeuvre of medical practitioners notably complicated. This study proposes to enhance such low-quality images by incorporating end-to-end learning strategies for accelerating medical image analysis tasks. To the best concern, this is the first work in medical imaging which comprehensively tackles perceptual enhancement, including contrast correction, luminance correction, denoising, etc., with a fully convolutional deep network. The proposed network leverages residual blocks and a residual gating mechanism for diminishing visual artefacts and is guided by a multi-term objective function to perceive the perceptually plausible enhanced images. The practicability of the deep medical image enhancement method has been extensively investigated with sophisticated experiments. The experimental outcomes illustrate that the proposed method could outperform the existing enhancement methods for different medical image modalities by 5.00 to 7.00 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) metrics and 4.00 to 6.00 in DeltaE metrics. Additionally, the proposed method can drastically improve the medical image analysis tasks' performance and reveal the potentiality of such an enhancement method in real-world applications. Code Available: https://github.com/sharif-apu/DPE_JBHI	IEEE ... IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2022	Code Link
Transform-Dependent Adversarial Attacks	2025-03-10	Show Deep networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, yet conventional attack methods utilize static adversarial perturbations that induce fixed mispredictions. In this work, we exploit an overlooked property of adversarial perturbations--their dependence on image transforms--and introduce transform-dependent adversarial attacks. Unlike traditional attacks, our perturbations exhibit metamorphic properties, enabling diverse adversarial effects as a function of transformation parameters. We demonstrate that this transform-dependent vulnerability exists across different architectures (e.g., CNN and transformer), vision tasks (e.g., image classification and object detection), and a wide range of image transforms. Additionally, we show that transform-dependent perturbations can serve as a defense mechanism, preventing sensitive information disclosure when image enhancement transforms pose a risk of revealing private content. Through analysis in blackbox and defended model settings, we show that transform-dependent perturbations achieve high targeted attack success rates, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer attacks by 17-31% in blackbox scenarios. Our work introduces novel, controllable paradigm for adversarial attack deployment, revealing a previously overlooked vulnerability in deep networks.		None
An Adaptive Underwater Image Enhancement Framework via Multi-Domain Fusion and Color Compensation	2025-03-05	Show Underwater optical imaging is severely degraded by light absorption, scattering, and color distortion, hindering visibility and accurate image analysis. This paper presents an adaptive enhancement framework integrating illumination compensation, multi-domain filtering, and dynamic color correction. A hybrid illumination compensation strategy combining CLAHE, Gamma correction, and Retinex enhances visibility. A two-stage filtering process, including spatial-domain (Gaussian, Bilateral, Guided) and frequency-domain (Fourier, Wavelet) methods, effectively reduces noise while preserving details. To correct color distortion, an adaptive color compensation (ACC) model estimates spectral attenuation and water type to combine RCP, DCP, and MUDCP dynamically. Finally, a perceptually guided color balance mechanism ensures natural color restoration. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in contrast enhancement, color correction, and structural preservation, making the framework robust for underwater imaging applications.		None
Perceptual Multi-Exposure Fusion	2025-03-05	Show As an ever-increasing demand for high dynamic range (HDR) scene shooting, multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) technology has abounded. In recent years, multi-scale exposure fusion approaches based on detail-enhancement have led the way for improvement in highlight and shadow details. Most of such methods, however, are too computationally expensive to be deployed on mobile devices. This paper presents a perceptual multi-exposure fusion method that not just ensures fine shadow/highlight details but with lower complexity than detailenhanced methods. We analyze the potential defects of three classical exposure measures in lieu of using detail-enhancement component and improve two of them, namely adaptive Wellexposedness (AWE) and the gradient of color images (3-D gradient). AWE designed in YCbCr color space considers the difference between varying exposure images. 3-D gradient is employed to extract fine details. We build a large-scale multiexposure benchmark dataset suitable for static scenes, which contains 167 image sequences all told. Experiments on the constructed dataset demonstrate that the proposed method exceeds existing eight state-of-the-art approaches in terms of visually and MEF-SSIM value. Moreover, our approach can achieve a better improvement for current image enhancement techniques, ensuring fine detail in bright light.		None
Night-Voyager: Consistent and Efficient Nocturnal Vision-Aided State Estimation in Object Maps	2025-03-04	Show Accurate and robust state estimation at nighttime is essential for autonomous robotic navigation to achieve nocturnal or round-the-clock tasks. An intuitive question arises: Can low-cost standard cameras be exploited for nocturnal state estimation? Regrettably, most existing visual methods may fail under adverse illumination conditions, even with active lighting or image enhancement. A pivotal insight, however, is that streetlights in most urban scenarios act as stable and salient prior visual cues at night, reminiscent of stars in deep space aiding spacecraft voyage in interstellar navigation. Inspired by this, we propose Night-Voyager, an object-level nocturnal vision-aided state estimation framework that leverages prior object maps and keypoints for versatile localization. We also find that the primary limitation of conventional visual methods under poor lighting conditions stems from the reliance on pixel-level metrics. In contrast, metric-agnostic, non-pixel-level object detection serves as a bridge between pixel-level and object-level spaces, enabling effective propagation and utilization of object map information within the system. Night-Voyager begins with a fast initialization to solve the global localization problem. By employing an effective two-stage cross-modal data association, the system delivers globally consistent state updates using map-based observations. To address the challenge of significant uncertainties in visual observations at night, a novel matrix Lie group formulation and a feature-decoupled multi-state invariant filter are introduced, ensuring consistent and efficient estimation. Through comprehensive experiments in both simulation and diverse real-world scenarios (spanning approximately 12.3 km), Night-Voyager showcases its efficacy, robustness, and efficiency, filling a critical gap in nocturnal vision-aided state estimation.	IEEE ... IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025	None
ERetinex: Event Camera Meets Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-03-04	Show Low-light image enhancement aims to restore the under-exposure image captured in dark scenarios. Under such scenarios, traditional frame-based cameras may fail to capture the structure and color information due to the exposure time limitation. Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that respond to pixel-wise brightness changes asynchronously. Event cameras' high dynamic range is pivotal for visual perception in extreme low-light scenarios, surpassing traditional cameras and enabling applications in challenging dark environments. In this paper, inspired by the success of the retinex theory for traditional frame-based low-light image restoration, we introduce the first methods that combine the retinex theory with event cameras and propose a novel retinex-based low-light image restoration framework named ERetinex. Among our contributions, the first is developing a new approach that leverages the high temporal resolution data from event cameras with traditional image information to estimate scene illumination accurately. This method outperforms traditional image-only techniques, especially in low-light environments, by providing more precise lighting information. Additionally, we propose an effective fusion strategy that combines the high dynamic range data from event cameras with the color information of traditional images to enhance image quality. Through this fusion, we can generate clearer and more detail-rich images, maintaining the integrity of visual information even under extreme lighting conditions. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a gain of 1.0613 dB in PSNR while reducing FLOPS by \textbf{84.28}%.	Accep... Accepted to ICRA 2025	None
Wavelet-Enhanced Desnowing: A Novel Single Image Restoration Approach for Traffic Surveillance under Adverse Weather Conditions	2025-03-03	Show Image restoration under adverse weather conditions refers to the process of removing degradation caused by weather particles while improving visual quality. Most existing deweathering methods rely on increasing the network scale and data volume to achieve better performance which requires more expensive computing power. Also, many methods lack generalization for specific applications. In the traffic surveillance screener, the main challenges are snow removal and veil effect elimination. In this paper, we propose a wavelet-enhanced snow removal method that use a Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform feature enhancement module and a dynamic convolution acceleration module to address snow degradation in surveillance images. We also use a residual learning restoration module to remove veil effects caused by rain, snow, and fog. The proposed architecture extracts and analyzes information from snow-covered regions, significantly improving snow removal performance. And the residual learning restoration module removes veiling effects in images, enhancing clarity and detail. Experiments show that it performs better than some popular desnowing methods. Our approach also demonstrates effectiveness and accuracy when applied to real traffic surveillance images.		None
Self-supervision via Controlled Transformation and Unpaired Self-conditioning for Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-03-01	Show Real-world low-light images captured by imaging devices suffer from poor visibility and require a domain-specific enhancement to produce artifact-free outputs that reveal details. In this paper, we propose an unpaired low-light image enhancement network leveraging novel controlled transformation-based self-supervision and unpaired self-conditioning strategies. The model determines the required degrees of enhancement at the input image pixels, which are learned from the unpaired low-lit and well-lit images without any direct supervision. The self-supervision is based on a controlled transformation of the input image and subsequent maintenance of its enhancement in spite of the transformation. The self-conditioning performs training of the model on unpaired images such that it does not enhance an already-enhanced image or a well-lit input image. The inherent noise in the input low-light images is handled by employing low gradient magnitude suppression in a detail-preserving manner. In addition, our noise handling is self-conditioned by preventing the denoising of noise-free well-lit images. The training based on low-light image enhancement-specific attributes allows our model to avoid paired supervision without compromising significantly in performance. While our proposed self-supervision aids consistent enhancement, our novel self-conditioning facilitates adequate enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple standard datasets demonstrate that our model, in general, outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and subjectively. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of our self-supervision and self-conditioning strategies, and the related loss functions.	Copyr... Copyright 2024 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works	None
Flow Matching for Medical Image Synthesis: Bridging the Gap Between Speed and Quality	2025-03-01	Show Deep learning models have emerged as a powerful tool for various medical applications. However, their success depends on large, high-quality datasets that are challenging to obtain due to privacy concerns and costly annotation. Generative models, such as diffusion models, offer a potential solution by synthesizing medical images, but their practical adoption is hindered by long inference times. In this paper, we propose the use of an optimal transport flow matching approach to accelerate image generation. By introducing a straighter mapping between the source and target distribution, our method significantly reduces inference time while preserving and further enhancing the quality of the outputs. Furthermore, this approach is highly adaptable, supporting various medical imaging modalities, conditioning mechanisms (such as class labels and masks), and different spatial dimensions, including 2D and 3D. Beyond image generation, it can also be applied to related tasks such as image enhancement. Our results demonstrate the efficiency and versatility of this framework, making it a promising advancement for medical imaging applications. Code with checkpoints and a synthetic dataset (beneficial for classification and segmentation) is now available on: https://github.com/milad1378yz/MOTFM.		Code Link
SEE: See Everything Every Time -- Adaptive Brightness Adjustment for Broad Light Range Images via Events	2025-02-28	Show Event cameras, with a high dynamic range exceeding $120dB$, significantly outperform traditional embedded cameras, robustly recording detailed changing information under various lighting conditions, including both low- and high-light situations. However, recent research on utilizing event data has primarily focused on low-light image enhancement, neglecting image enhancement and brightness adjustment across a broader range of lighting conditions, such as normal or high illumination. Based on this, we propose a novel research question: how to employ events to enhance and adaptively adjust the brightness of images captured under broad lighting conditions? To investigate this question, we first collected a new dataset, SEE-600K, consisting of 610,126 images and corresponding events across 202 scenarios, each featuring an average of four lighting conditions with over a 1000-fold variation in illumination. Subsequently, we propose a framework that effectively utilizes events to smoothly adjust image brightness through the use of prompts. Our framework captures color through sensor patterns, uses cross-attention to model events as a brightness dictionary, and adjusts the image's dynamic range to form a broad light-range representation (BLR), which is then decoded at the pixel level based on the brightness prompt. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only performs well on the low-light enhancement dataset but also shows robust performance on broader light-range image enhancement using the SEE-600K dataset. Additionally, our approach enables pixel-level brightness adjustment, providing flexibility for post-processing and inspiring more imaging applications. The dataset and source code are publicly available at:https://github.com/yunfanLu/SEE.		Code Link
HVI: A New Color Space for Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-02-28	Show Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to remove the red artifacts, while the latter compresses the low-light regions to remove the black artifacts. To fully leverage the chromatic and intensity information, a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) is further introduced to learn accurate photometric mapping function under different lighting conditions in the HVI space. Comprehensive results from benchmark and ablation experiments show that the proposed HVI color space with CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.	Qings... Qingsen Yan, Yixu Feng, and Cheng Zhang contributed equally to this work	Code Link
Striving for Faster and Better: A One-Layer Architecture with Auto Re-parameterization for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-02-27	Show Deep learning-based low-light image enhancers have made significant progress in recent years, with a trend towards achieving satisfactory visual quality while gradually reducing the number of parameters and improving computational efficiency. In this work, we aim to delving into the limits of image enhancers both from visual quality and computational efficiency, while striving for both better performance and faster processing. To be concrete, by rethinking the task demands, we build an explicit connection, i.e., visual quality and computational efficiency are corresponding to model learning and structure design, respectively. Around this connection, we enlarge parameter space by introducing the re-parameterization for ample model learning of a pre-defined minimalist network (e.g., just one layer), to avoid falling into a local solution. To strengthen the structural representation, we define a hierarchical search scheme for discovering a task-oriented re-parameterized structure, which also provides powerful support for efficiency. Ultimately, this achieves efficient low-light image enhancement using only a single convolutional layer, while maintaining excellent visual quality. Experimental results show our sensible superiority both in quality and efficiency against recently-proposed methods. Especially, our running time on various platforms (e.g., CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP) consistently moves beyond the existing fastest scheme. The source code will be released at https://github.com/vis-opt-group/AR-LLIE.		Code Link
CLIP-Optimized Multimodal Image Enhancement via ISP-CNN Fusion for Coal Mine IoVT under Uneven Illumination	2025-02-26	Show Clear monitoring images are crucial for the safe operation of coal mine Internet of Video Things (IoVT) systems. However, low illumination and uneven brightness in underground environments significantly degrade image quality, posing challenges for enhancement methods that often rely on difficult-to-obtain paired reference images. Additionally, there is a trade-off between enhancement performance and computational efficiency on edge devices within IoVT systems.To address these issues, we propose a multimodal image enhancement method tailored for coal mine IoVT, utilizing an ISP-CNN fusion architecture optimized for uneven illumination. This two-stage strategy combines global enhancement with detail optimization, effectively improving image quality, especially in poorly lit areas. A CLIP-based multimodal iterative optimization allows for unsupervised training of the enhancement algorithm. By integrating traditional image signal processing (ISP) with convolutional neural networks (CNN), our approach reduces computational complexity while maintaining high performance, making it suitable for real-time deployment on edge devices.Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates uneven brightness and enhances key image quality metrics, with PSNR improvements of 2.9%-4.9%, SSIM by 4.3%-11.4%, and VIF by 4.9%-17.8% compared to seven state-of-the-art algorithms. Simulated coal mine monitoring scenarios validate our method's ability to balance performance and computational demands, facilitating real-time enhancement and supporting safer mining operations.		None
Improved Partial Differential Equation and Fast Approximation Algorithm for Hazy/Underwater/Dust Storm Image Enhancement	2025-02-21	Show This paper presents an improved and modified partial differential equation (PDE)-based de-hazing algorithm. The proposed method combines logarithmic image processing models in a PDE formulation refined with linear filter-based operators in either spatial or frequency domain. Additionally, a fast, simplified de-hazing function approximation of the hazy image formation model is developed in combination with fuzzy homomorphic refinement. The proposed algorithm solves the problem of image darkening and over-enhancement of edges in addition to enhancement of dark image regions encountered in previous formulations. This is in addition to avoiding enhancement of sky regions in de-hazed images while avoiding halo effect. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is utilized for underwater and dust storm image enhancement with the incorporation of a modified global contrast enhancement algorithm. Experimental comparisons indicate that the proposed approach surpasses a majority of the algorithms from the literature based on quantitative image quality metrics.	18 pages, 11 figures	None
LUMINA-Net: Low-light Upgrade through Multi-stage Illumination and Noise Adaptation Network for Image Enhancement	2025-02-21	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial task in computer vision aimed to enhance the visual fidelity of images captured under low-illumination conditions. Conventional methods frequently struggle to mitigate pervasive shortcomings such as noise, over-exposure, and color distortion thereby precipitating a pronounced degradation in image quality. To address these challenges, we propose LUMINA-Net an advanced deep learning framework designed specifically by integrating multi-stage illumination and reflectance modules. First, the illumination module intelligently adjusts brightness and contrast levels while meticulously preserving intricate textural details. Second, the reflectance module incorporates a noise reduction mechanism that leverages spatial attention and channel-wise feature refinement to mitigate noise contamination. Through a comprehensive suite of experiments conducted on LOL and SICE datasets using PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS metrics, surpassing state-of-the-art methodologies and showcasing its efficacy in low-light image enhancement.	9 pages, 4 figures	None
Optimized Pap Smear Image Enhancement: Hybrid PMD Filter-CLAHE Using Spider Monkey Optimization	2025-02-21	Show Pap smear image quality is crucial for cervical cancer detection. This study introduces an optimized hybrid approach that combines the Perona-Malik Diffusion (PMD) filter with contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) to enhance Pap smear image quality. The PMD filter reduces the image noise, whereas CLAHE improves the image contrast. The hybrid method was optimized using spider monkey optimization (SMO PMD-CLAHE). BRISQUE and CEIQ are the new objective functions for the PMD filter and CLAHE optimization, respectively. The simulations were conducted using the SIPaKMeD dataset. The results indicate that SMO outperforms state-of-the-art methods in optimizing the PMD filter and CLAHE. The proposed method achieved an average effective measure of enhancement (EME) of 5.45, root mean square (RMS) contrast of 60.45, Michelson's contrast (MC) of 0.995, and entropy of 6.80. This approach offers a new perspective for improving Pap smear image quality.		None
EyeBench: A Call for More Rigorous Evaluation of Retinal Image Enhancement	2025-02-20	Show Over the past decade, generative models have achieved significant success in enhancement fundus images.However, the evaluation of these models still presents a considerable challenge. A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for fundus image enhancement is indispensable for three main reasons: 1) The existing denoising metrics (e.g., PSNR, SSIM) are hardly to extend to downstream real-world clinical research (e.g., Vessel morphology consistency). 2) There is a lack of comprehensive evaluation for both paired and unpaired enhancement methods, along with the need for expert protocols to accurately assess clinical value. 3) An ideal evaluation system should provide insights to inform future developments of fundus image enhancement. To this end, we propose a novel comprehensive benchmark, EyeBench, to provide insights that align enhancement models with clinical needs, offering a foundation for future work to improve the clinical relevance and applicability of generative models for fundus image enhancement. EyeBench has three appealing properties: 1) multi-dimensional clinical alignment downstream evaluation: In addition to evaluating the enhancement task, we provide several clinically significant downstream tasks for fundus images, including vessel segmentation, DR grading, denoising generalization, and lesion segmentation. 2) Medical expert-guided evaluation design: We introduce a novel dataset that promote comprehensive and fair comparisons between paired and unpaired methods and includes a manual evaluation protocol by medical experts. 3) Valuable insights: Our benchmark study provides a comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of existing methods across different downstream tasks, assisting medical experts in making informed choices. Additionally, we offer further analysis of the challenges faced by existing methods. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Retinal-Research/EyeBench}		Code Link
IRSRMamba: Infrared Image Super-Resolution via Mamba-based Wavelet Transform Feature Modulation Model	2025-02-17	Show Infrared image super-resolution demands long-range dependency modeling and multi-scale feature extraction to address challenges such as homogeneous backgrounds, weak edges, and sparse textures. While Mamba-based state-space models (SSMs) excel in global dependency modeling with linear complexity, their block-wise processing disrupts spatial consistency, limiting their effectiveness for IR image reconstruction. We propose IRSRMamba, a novel framework integrating wavelet transform feature modulation for multi-scale adaptation and an SSMs-based semantic consistency loss to restore fragmented contextual information. This design enhances global-local feature fusion, structural coherence, and fine-detail preservation while mitigating block-induced artifacts. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that IRSRMamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods in PSNR, SSIM, and perceptual quality. This work establishes Mamba-based architectures as a promising direction for high-fidelity IR image enhancement. Code are available at https://github.com/yongsongH/IRSRMamba.	This ... This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication	Code Link
Zero-Reference Lighting Estimation Diffusion Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2025-02-16	Show Diffusion model-based low-light image enhancement methods rely heavily on paired training data, leading to limited extensive application. Meanwhile, existing unsupervised methods lack effective bridging capabilities for unknown degradation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel zero-reference lighting estimation diffusion model for low-light image enhancement called Zero-LED. It utilizes the stable convergence ability of diffusion models to bridge the gap between low-light domains and real normal-light domains and successfully alleviates the dependence on pairwise training data via zero-reference learning. Specifically, we first design the initial optimization network to preprocess the input image and implement bidirectional constraints between the diffusion model and the initial optimization network through multiple objective functions. Subsequently, the degradation factors of the real-world scene are optimized iteratively to achieve effective light enhancement. In addition, we explore a frequency-domain based and semantically guided appearance reconstruction module that encourages feature alignment of the recovered image at a fine-grained level and satisfies subjective expectations. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach to other state-of-the-art methods and more significant generalization capabilities. We will open the source code upon acceptance of the paper.		None
VIIS: Visible and Infrared Information Synthesis for Severe Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-02-13	Show Images captured in severe low-light circumstances often suffer from significant information absence. Existing singular modality image enhancement methods struggle to restore image regions lacking valid information. By leveraging light-impervious infrared images, visible and infrared image fusion methods have the potential to reveal information hidden in darkness. However, they primarily emphasize inter-modal complementation but neglect intra-modal enhancement, limiting the perceptual quality of output images. To address these limitations, we propose a novel task, dubbed visible and infrared information synthesis (VIIS), which aims to achieve both information enhancement and fusion of the two modalities. Given the difficulty in obtaining ground truth in the VIIS task, we design an information synthesis pretext task (ISPT) based on image augmentation. We employ a diffusion model as the framework and design a sparse attention-based dual-modalities residual (SADMR) conditioning mechanism to enhance information interaction between the two modalities. This mechanism enables features with prior knowledge from both modalities to adaptively and iteratively attend to each modality's information during the denoising process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our model qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms not only the state-of-the-art methods in relevant fields but also the newly designed baselines capable of both information enhancement and fusion. The code is available at https://github.com/Chenz418/VIIS.	Accep... Accepted to WACV 2025	Code Link
A Comprehensive Survey on Image Signal Processing Approaches for Low-Illumination Image Enhancement	2025-02-09	Show The usage of digital content (photos and videos) in a variety of applications has increased due to the popularity of multimedia devices. These uses include advertising campaigns, educational resources, and social networking platforms. There is an increasing need for high-quality graphic information as people become more visually focused. However, captured images frequently have poor visibility and a high amount of noise due to the limitations of image-capturing devices and lighting conditions. Improving the visual quality of images taken in low illumination is the aim of low-illumination image enhancement. This problem is addressed by traditional image enhancement techniques, which alter noise, brightness, and contrast. Deep learning-based methods, however, have dominated recently made advances in this area. These methods have effectively reduced noise while preserving important information, showing promising results in the improvement of low-illumination images. An extensive summary of image signal processing methods for enhancing low-illumination images is provided in this paper. Three categories are classified in the review for approaches: hybrid techniques, deep learning-based methods, and traditional approaches. Conventional techniques include denoising, automated white balancing, and noise reduction. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used in deep learningbased techniques to recognize and extract characteristics from low-light images. To get better results, hybrid approaches combine deep learning-based methodologies with more conventional methods. The review also discusses the advantages and limitations of each approach and provides insights into future research directions in this field.		None
Defeasible Visual Entailment: Benchmark, Evaluator, and Reward-Driven Optimization	2025-02-08	Show We introduce a new task called Defeasible Visual Entailment (DVE), where the goal is to allow the modification of the entailment relationship between an image premise and a text hypothesis based on an additional update. While this concept is well-established in Natural Language Inference, it remains unexplored in visual entailment. At a high level, DVE enables models to refine their initial interpretations, leading to improved accuracy and reliability in various applications such as detecting misleading information in images, enhancing visual question answering, and refining decision-making processes in autonomous systems. Existing metrics do not adequately capture the change in the entailment relationship brought by updates. To address this, we propose a novel inference-aware evaluator designed to capture changes in entailment strength induced by updates, using pairwise contrastive learning and categorical information learning. Additionally, we introduce a reward-driven update optimization method to further enhance the quality of updates generated by multimodal models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed evaluator and optimization method.	Accep... Accepted by AAAI 2025	None
Segmentation-free integration of nuclei morphology and spatial transcriptomics for retinal images	2025-02-08	Show This study introduces SEFI (SEgmentation-Free Integration), a novel method for integrating morphological features of cell nuclei with spatial transcriptomics data. Cell segmentation poses a significant challenge in the analysis of spatial transcriptomics data, as tissue-specific structural complexities and densely packed cells in certain regions make it difficult to develop a universal approach. SEFI addresses this by utilizing self-supervised learning to extract morphological features from fluorescent nuclear staining images, enhancing the clustering of gene expression data without requiring segmentation. We demonstrate SEFI on spatially resolved gene expression profiles of the developing retina, acquired using multiplexed single molecule Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (smFISH). SEFI is publicly available at https://github.com/eduardchelebian/sefi.		Code Link
Performance Evaluation of Image Enhancement Techniques on Transfer Learning for Touchless Fingerprint Recognition	2025-02-07	Show Fingerprint recognition remains one of the most reliable biometric technologies due to its high accuracy and uniqueness. Traditional systems rely on contact-based scanners, which are prone to issues such as image degradation from surface contamination and inconsistent user interaction. To address these limitations, contactless fingerprint recognition has emerged as a promising alternative, providing non-intrusive and hygienic authentication. This study evaluates the impact of image enhancement tech-niques on the performance of pre-trained deep learning models using transfer learning for touchless fingerprint recognition. The IIT-Bombay Touchless and Touch-Based Fingerprint Database, containing data from 200 subjects, was employed to test the per-formance of deep learning architectures such as VGG-16, VGG-19, Inception-V3, and ResNet-50. Experimental results reveal that transfer learning methods with fingerprint image enhance-ment (indirect method) significantly outperform those without enhancement (direct method). Specifically, VGG-16 achieved an accuracy of 98% in training and 93% in testing when using the enhanced images, demonstrating superior performance compared to the direct method. This paper provides a detailed comparison of the effectiveness of image enhancement in improving the accuracy of transfer learning models for touchless fingerprint recognition, offering key insights for developing more efficient biometric systems.	6 pages	None
KAN See In the Dark	2025-02-06	Show Existing low-light image enhancement methods are difficult to fit the complex nonlinear relationship between normal and low-light images due to uneven illumination and noise effects. The recently proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) feature spline-based convolutional layers and learnable activation functions, which can effectively capture nonlinear dependencies. In this paper, we design a KAN-Block based on KANs and innovatively apply it to low-light image enhancement. This method effectively alleviates the limitations of current methods constrained by linear network structures and lack of interpretability, further demonstrating the potential of KANs in low-level vision tasks. Given the poor perception of current low-light image enhancement methods and the stochastic nature of the inverse diffusion process, we further introduce frequency-domain perception for visually oriented enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of our method on benchmark datasets. The code will be available at: https://github.com/AXNing/KSID}{https://github.com/AXNing/KSID.		Code Link
A framework for river connectivity classification using temporal image processing and attention based neural networks	2025-02-01	Show Measuring the connectivity of water in rivers and streams is essential for effective water resource management. Increased extreme weather events associated with climate change can result in alterations to river and stream connectivity. While traditional stream flow gauges are costly to deploy and limited to large river bodies, trail camera methods are a low-cost and easily deployed alternative to collect hourly data. Image capturing, however requires stream ecologists to manually curate (select and label) tens of thousands of images per year. To improve this workflow, we developed an automated instream trail camera image classification system consisting of three parts: (1) image processing, (2) image augmentation and (3) machine learning. The image preprocessing consists of seven image quality filters, foliage-based luma variance reduction, resizing and bottom-center cropping. Images are balanced using variable amount of generative augmentation using diffusion models and then passed to a machine learning classification model in labeled form. By using the vision transformer architecture and temporal image enhancement in our framework, we are able to increase the 75% base accuracy to 90% for a new unseen site image. We make use of a dataset captured and labeled by staff from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection between 2018-2020. Our results indicate that a combination of temporal image processing and attention-based models are effective at classifying unseen river connectivity images.	15 pages, 8 figures	None
DarkIR: Robust Low-Light Image Restoration	2025-01-31	Show Photography during night or in dark conditions typically suffers from noise, low light and blurring issues due to the dim environment and the common use of long exposure. Although Deblurring and Low-light Image Enhancement (LLIE) are related under these conditions, most approaches in image restoration solve these tasks separately. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust neural network for multi-task low-light image restoration. Instead of following the current tendency of Transformer-based models, we propose new attention mechanisms to enhance the receptive field of efficient CNNs. Our method reduces the computational costs in terms of parameters and MAC operations compared to previous methods. Our model, DarkIR, achieves new state-of-the-art results on the popular LOLBlur, LOLv2 and Real-LOLBlur datasets, being able to generalize on real-world night and dark images. Code and models at https://github.com/cidautai/DarkIR	Technical Report	Code Link
Bayesian Neural Networks for One-to-Many Mapping in Image Enhancement	2025-01-30	Show In image enhancement tasks, such as low-light and underwater image enhancement, a degraded image can correspond to multiple plausible target images due to dynamic photography conditions, such as variations in illumination. This naturally results in a one-to-many mapping challenge. To address this, we propose a Bayesian Enhancement Model (BEM) that incorporates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to capture data uncertainty and produce diverse outputs. To achieve real-time inference, we introduce a two-stage approach: Stage I employs a BNN to model the one-to-many mappings in the low-dimensional space, while Stage II refines fine-grained image details using a Deterministic Neural Network (DNN). To accelerate BNN training and convergence, we introduce a dynamic Momentum Prior. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light and underwater image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over deterministic models.		None
Segmentation-Aware Generative Reinforcement Network (GRN) for Tissue Layer Segmentation in 3-D Ultrasound Images for Chronic Low-back Pain (cLBP) Assessment	2025-01-29	Show We introduce a novel segmentation-aware joint training framework called generative reinforcement network (GRN) that integrates segmentation loss feedback to optimize both image generation and segmentation performance in a single stage. An image enhancement technique called segmentation-guided enhancement (SGE) is also developed, where the generator produces images tailored specifically for the segmentation model. Two variants of GRN were also developed, including GRN for sample-efficient learning (GRN-SEL) and GRN for semi-supervised learning (GRN-SSL). GRN's performance was evaluated using a dataset of 69 fully annotated 3D ultrasound scans from 29 subjects. The annotations included six anatomical structures: dermis, superficial fat, superficial fascial membrane (SFM), deep fat, deep fascial membrane (DFM), and muscle. Our results show that GRN-SEL with SGE reduces labeling efforts by up to 70% while achieving a 1.98% improvement in the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) compared to models trained on fully labeled datasets. GRN-SEL alone reduces labeling efforts by 60%, GRN-SSL with SGE decreases labeling requirements by 70%, and GRN-SSL alone by 60%, all while maintaining performance comparable to fully supervised models. These findings suggest the effectiveness of the GRN framework in optimizing segmentation performance with significantly less labeled data, offering a scalable and efficient solution for ultrasound image analysis and reducing the burdens associated with data annotation.		None
Text-to-Image Generation for Vocabulary Learning Using the Keyword Method	2025-01-28	Show The 'keyword method' is an effective technique for learning vocabulary of a foreign language. It involves creating a memorable visual link between what a word means and what its pronunciation in a foreign language sounds like in the learner's native language. However, these memorable visual links remain implicit in the people's mind and are not easy to remember for a large set of words. To enhance the memorisation and recall of the vocabulary, we developed an application that combines the keyword method with text-to-image generators to externalise the memorable visual links into visuals. These visuals represent additional stimuli during the memorisation process. To explore the effectiveness of this approach we first run a pilot study to investigate how difficult it is to externalise the descriptions of mental visualisations of memorable links, by asking participants to write them down. We used these descriptions as prompts for text-to-image generator (DALL-E2) to convert them into images and asked participants to select their favourites. Next, we compared different text-to-image generators (DALL-E2, Midjourney, Stable and Latent Diffusion) to evaluate the perceived quality of the generated images by each. Despite heterogeneous results, participants mostly preferred images generated by DALL-E2, which was used also for the final study. In this study, we investigated whether providing such images enhances the retention of vocabulary being learned, compared to the keyword method only. Our results indicate that people did not encounter difficulties describing their visualisations of memorable links and that providing corresponding images significantly improves memory retention.		None
Directing Mamba to Complex Textures: An Efficient Texture-Aware State Space Model for Image Restoration	2025-01-27	Show Image restoration aims to recover details and enhance contrast in degraded images. With the growing demand for high-quality imaging (\textit{e.g.}, 4K and 8K), achieving a balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency has become increasingly critical. Existing methods, primarily based on CNNs, Transformers, or their hybrid approaches, apply uniform deep representation extraction across the image. However, these methods often struggle to effectively model long-range dependencies and largely overlook the spatial characteristics of image degradation (regions with richer textures tend to suffer more severe damage), making it hard to achieve the best trade-off between restoration quality and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a novel texture-aware image restoration method, TAMambaIR, which simultaneously perceives image textures and achieves a trade-off between performance and efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a novel Texture-Aware State Space Model, which enhances texture awareness and improves efficiency by modulating the transition matrix of the state-space equation and focusing on regions with complex textures. Additionally, we design a {Multi-Directional Perception Block} to improve multi-directional receptive fields while maintaining low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on benchmarks for image super-resolution, deraining, and low-light image enhancement demonstrate that TAMambaIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency, establishing it as a robust and efficient framework for image restoration.	Technical Report	None
PEP-GS: Perceptually-Enhanced Precise Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering	2025-01-27	Show Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has achieved significant success in real-time, high-quality 3D scene rendering. However, it faces several challenges, including Gaussian redundancy, limited ability to capture view-dependent effects, and difficulties in handling complex lighting and specular reflections. Additionally, methods that use spherical harmonics for color representation often struggle to effectively capture specular highlights and anisotropic components, especially when modeling view-dependent colors under complex lighting conditions, leading to insufficient contrast and unnatural color saturation. To address these limitations, we introduce PEP-GS, a perceptually-enhanced framework that dynamically predicts Gaussian attributes, including opacity, color, and covariance. We replace traditional spherical harmonics with a Hierarchical Granular-Structural Attention mechanism, which enables more accurate modeling of complex view-dependent color effects and specular highlights. By employing a stable and interpretable framework for opacity and covariance estimation, PEP-GS avoids the removal of essential Gaussians prematurely, ensuring a more accurate scene representation. Furthermore, perceptual optimization is applied to the final rendered images, enhancing perceptual consistency across different views and ensuring high-quality renderings with improved texture fidelity and fine-scale detail preservation. Experimental results demonstrate that PEP-GS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios involving view-dependent effects, specular reflections, and fine-scale details.		None
UDBE: Unsupervised Diffusion-based Brightness Enhancement in Underwater Images	2025-01-27	Show Activities in underwater environments are paramount in several scenarios, which drives the continuous development of underwater image enhancement techniques. A major challenge in this domain is the depth at which images are captured, with increasing depth resulting in a darker environment. Most existing methods for underwater image enhancement focus on noise removal and color adjustment, with few works dedicated to brightness enhancement. This work introduces a novel unsupervised learning approach to underwater image enhancement using a diffusion model. Our method, called UDBE, is based on conditional diffusion to maintain the brightness details of the unpaired input images. The input image is combined with a color map and a Signal-Noise Relation map (SNR) to ensure stable training and prevent color distortion in the output images. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves an impressive accuracy rate in the datasets UIEB, SUIM and RUIE, well-established underwater image benchmarks. Additionally, the experiments validate the robustness of our approach, regarding the image quality metrics PSNR, SSIM, UIQM, and UISM, indicating the good performance of the brightness enhancement process. The source code is available here: https://github.com/gusanagy/UDBE.	Paper... Paper presented at ICMLA 2024	Code Link
GeoGround: A Unified Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing Visual Grounding	2025-01-25	Show Remote sensing (RS) visual grounding aims to use natural language expression to locate specific objects (in the form of the bounding box or segmentation mask) in RS images, enhancing human interaction with intelligent RS interpretation systems. Early research in this area was primarily based on horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs), but as more diverse RS datasets have become available, tasks involving oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) and segmentation masks have emerged. In practical applications, different targets require different grounding types: HBB can localize an object's position, OBB provides its orientation, and mask depicts its shape. However, existing specialized methods are typically tailored to a single type of RS visual grounding task and are hard to generalize across tasks. In contrast, large vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit powerful multi-task learning capabilities but struggle to handle dense prediction tasks like segmentation. This paper proposes GeoGround, a novel framework that unifies support for HBB, OBB, and mask RS visual grounding tasks, allowing flexible output selection. Rather than customizing the architecture of VLM, our work aims to elegantly support pixel-level visual grounding output through the Text-Mask technique. We define prompt-assisted and geometry-guided learning to enhance consistency across different signals. To support model training, we present refGeo, a large-scale RS visual instruction-following dataset containing 161k image-text pairs. Experimental results show that GeoGround demonstrates strong performance across four RS visual grounding tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/zytx121/GeoGround	25 pages, 19 figures	Code Link
Enhanced Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy with Adaptive Physics Informed Deep Autoencoders	2025-01-24	Show We present a physics-informed deep learning framework to address common limitations in Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM), such as diffraction limited resolution, noise, and undersampling due to low laser power conditions. The optical system's point spread function (PSF) and common CLSM image degradation mechanisms namely photon shot noise, dark current noise, motion blur, speckle noise, and undersampling were modeled and were directly included into model architecture. The model reconstructs high fidelity images from heavily noisy inputs by using convolutional and transposed convolutional layers. Following the advances in compressed sensing, our approach significantly reduces data acquisition requirements without compromising image resolution. The proposed method was extensively evaluated on simulated CLSM images of diverse structures, including lipid droplets, neuronal networks, and fibrillar systems. Comparisons with traditional deconvolution algorithms such as Richardson-Lucy (RL), non-negative least squares (NNLS), and other methods like Total Variation (TV) regularization, Wiener filtering, and Wavelet denoising demonstrate the superiority of the network in restoring fine structural details with high fidelity. Assessment metrics like Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), underlines that the AdaptivePhysicsAutoencoder achieved robust image enhancement across diverse CLSM conditions, helping faster acquisition, reduced photodamage, and reliable performance in low light and sparse sampling scenarios holding promise for applications in live cell imaging, dynamic biological studies, and high throughput material characterization.		None
Where Do You Go? Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction using Scene Features	2025-01-23	Show Accurate prediction of pedestrian trajectories is crucial for enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles and reducing traffic fatalities involving pedestrians. While numerous studies have focused on modeling interactions among pedestrians to forecast their movements, the influence of environmental factors and scene-object placements has been comparatively underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel trajectory prediction model that integrates both pedestrian interactions and environmental context to improve prediction accuracy. Our approach captures spatial and temporal interactions among pedestrians within a sparse graph framework. To account for pedestrian-scene interactions, we employ advanced image enhancement and semantic segmentation techniques to extract detailed scene features. These scene and interaction features are then fused through a cross-attention mechanism, enabling the model to prioritize relevant environmental factors that influence pedestrian movements. Finally, a temporal convolutional network processes the fused features to predict future pedestrian trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving ADE and FDE values of 0.252 and 0.372 meters, respectively, underscoring the importance of incorporating both social interactions and environmental context in pedestrian trajectory prediction.	Accep... Accepted by 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and its Emerging Applications	None
Quality Enhancement of Radiographic X-ray Images by Interpretable Mapping	2025-01-21	Show X-ray imaging is the most widely used medical imaging modality. However, in the common practice, inconsistency in the initial presentation of X-ray images is a common complaint by radiologists. Different patient positions, patient habitus and scanning protocols can lead to differences in image presentations, e.g., differences in brightness and contrast globally or regionally. To compensate for this, additional work will be executed by clinical experts to adjust the images to the desired presentation, which can be time-consuming. Existing deep-learning-based end-to-end solutions can automatically correct images with promising performances. Nevertheless, these methods are hard to be interpreted and difficult to be understood by clinical experts. In this manuscript, a novel interpretable mapping method by deep learning is proposed, which automatically enhances the image brightness and contrast globally and locally. Meanwhile, because the model is inspired by the workflow of the brightness and contrast manipulation, it can provide interpretable pixel maps for explaining the motivation of image enhancement. The experiment on the clinical datasets show the proposed method can provide consistent brightness and contrast correction on X-ray images with accuracy of 24.75 dB PSNR and 0.8431 SSIM.	SPIE ... SPIE Medical Imaging 2025	None
FLOL: Fast Baselines for Real-World Low-Light Enhancement	2025-01-16	Show Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a key task in computational photography and imaging. The problem of enhancing images captured during night or in dark environments has been well-studied in the image signal processing literature. However, current deep learning-based solutions struggle with efficiency and robustness in real-world scenarios (e.g. scenes with noise, saturated pixels, bad illumination). We propose a lightweight neural network that combines image processing in the frequency and spatial domains. Our method, FLOL+, is one of the fastest models for this task, achieving state-of-the-art results on popular real scenes datasets such as LOL and LSRW. Moreover, we are able to process 1080p images under 12ms. Code and models at https://github.com/cidautai/FLOL	Technical Report	Code Link
When No-Reference Image Quality Models Meet MAP Estimation in Diffusion Latents	2025-01-15	Show Contemporary no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models can effectively quantify perceived image quality, often achieving strong correlations with human perceptual scores on standard IQA benchmarks. Yet, limited efforts have been devoted to treating NR-IQA models as natural image priors for real-world image enhancement, and consequently comparing them from a perceptual optimization standpoint. In this work, we show -- for the first time -- that NR-IQA models can be plugged into the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation framework for image enhancement. This is achieved by performing gradient ascent in the diffusion latent space rather than in the raw pixel domain, leveraging a pretrained differentiable and bijective diffusion process. Likely, different NR-IQA models lead to different enhanced outputs, which in turn provides a new computational means of comparing them. Unlike conventional correlation-based measures, our comparison method offers complementary insights into the respective strengths and weaknesses of the competing NR-IQA models in perceptual optimization scenarios. Additionally, we aim to improve the best-performing NR-IQA model in diffusion latent MAP estimation by incorporating the advantages of other top-performing methods. The resulting model delivers noticeably better results in enhancing real-world images afflicted by unknown and complex distortions, all preserving a high degree of image fidelity.		None
AI Driven Water Segmentation with deep learning models for Enhanced Flood Monitoring	2025-01-14	Show Flooding is a major natural hazard causing significant fatalities and economic losses annually, with increasing frequency due to climate change. Rapid and accurate flood detection and monitoring are crucial for mitigating these impacts. This study compares the performance of three deep learning models UNet, ResNet, and DeepLabv3 for pixelwise water segmentation to aid in flood detection, utilizing images from drones, in field observations, and social media. This study involves creating a new dataset that augments wellknown benchmark datasets with flood-specific images, enhancing the robustness of the models. The UNet, ResNet, and DeepLab v3 architectures are tested to determine their effectiveness in various environmental conditions and geographical locations, and the strengths and limitations of each model are also discussed here, providing insights into their applicability in different scenarios by predicting image segmentation masks. This fully automated approach allows these models to isolate flooded areas in images, significantly reducing processing time compared to traditional semi-automated methods. The outcome of this study is to predict segmented masks for each image effected by a flood disaster and the validation accuracy of these models. This methodology facilitates timely and continuous flood monitoring, providing vital data for emergency response teams to reduce loss of life and economic damages. It offers a significant reduction in the time required to generate flood maps, cutting down the manual processing time. Additionally, we present avenues for future research, including the integration of multimodal data sources and the development of robust deep learning architectures tailored specifically for flood detection tasks. Overall, our work contributes to the advancement of flood management strategies through innovative use of deep learning technologies.	8 pages, 6 figures	None
MambaTrack: Exploiting Dual-Enhancement for Night UAV Tracking	2025-01-14	Show Night unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is impeded by the challenges of poor illumination, with previous daylight-optimized methods demonstrating suboptimal performance in low-light conditions, limiting the utility of UAV applications. To this end, we propose an efficient mamba-based tracker, leveraging dual enhancement techniques to boost night UAV tracking. The mamba-based low-light enhancer, equipped with an illumination estimator and a damage restorer, achieves global image enhancement while preserving the details and structure of low-light images. Additionally, we advance a cross-modal mamba network to achieve efficient interactive learning between vision and language modalities. Extensive experiments showcase that our method achieves advanced performance and exhibits significantly improved computation and memory efficiency. For instance, our method is 2.8$\times$ faster than CiteTracker and reduces 50.2$%$ GPU memory. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}.	Preprint	Code Link
PSA-VLM: Enhancing Vision-Language Model Safety through Progressive Concept-Bottleneck-Driven Alignment	2025-01-13	Show Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained visual encoder models connected to LLMs form Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, recent research shows that the visual modality in VLMs is highly vulnerable, allowing attackers to bypass safety alignment in LLMs through visually transmitted content, launching harmful attacks. To address this challenge, we propose a progressive concept-based alignment strategy, PSA-VLM, which incorporates safety modules as concept bottlenecks to enhance visual modality safety alignment. By aligning model predictions with specific safety concepts, we improve defenses against risky images, enhancing explainability and controllability while minimally impacting general performance. Our method is obtained through two-stage training. The low computational cost of the first stage brings very effective performance improvement, and the fine-tuning of the language model in the second stage further improves the safety performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on popular VLM safety benchmark.	arXiv... arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2405.13581	None
Natural Language Supervision for Low-light Image Enhancement	2025-01-11	Show With the development of deep learning, numerous methods for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) have demonstrated remarkable performance. Mainstream LLIE methods typically learn an end-to-end mapping based on pairs of low-light and normal-light images. However, normal-light images under varying illumination conditions serve as reference images, making it difficult to define a ``perfect'' reference image This leads to the challenge of reconciling metric-oriented and visual-friendly results. Recently, many cross-modal studies have found that side information from other related modalities can guide visual representation learning. Based on this, we introduce a Natural Language Supervision (NLS) strategy, which learns feature maps from text corresponding to images, offering a general and flexible interface for describing an image under different illumination. However, image distributions conditioned on textual descriptions are highly multimodal, which makes training difficult. To address this issue, we design a Textual Guidance Conditioning Mechanism (TCM) that incorporates the connections between image regions and sentence words, enhancing the ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal cues for images and text. This strategy not only utilizes a wider range of supervised sources, but also provides a new paradigm for LLIE based on visual and textual feature alignment. In order to effectively identify and merge features from various levels of image and textual information, we design an Information Fusion Attention (IFA) module to enhance different regions at different levels. We integrate the proposed TCM and IFA into a Natural Language Supervision network for LLIE, named NaLSuper. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and superior effectiveness of our proposed NaLSuper.	12 pages, 10 figures	None
Underwater Image Enhancement using Generative Adversarial Networks: A Survey	2025-01-10	Show In recent years, there has been a surge of research focused on underwater image enhancement using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), driven by the need to overcome the challenges posed by underwater environments. Issues such as light attenuation, scattering, and color distortion severely degrade the quality of underwater images, limiting their use in critical applications. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing underwater photos due to their ability to learn complex transformations and generate realistic outputs. These advancements have been applied to real-world applications, including marine biology and ecosystem monitoring, coral reef health assessment, underwater archaeology, and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation. This paper explores all major approaches to underwater image enhancement, from physical and physics-free models to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models and state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. It provides a comprehensive analysis of these methods, evaluation metrics, datasets, and loss functions, offering a holistic view of the field. Furthermore, the paper delves into the limitations and challenges faced by current methods, such as generalization issues, high computational demands, and dataset biases, while suggesting potential directions for future research.	15 pa... 15 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables	None
HipyrNet: Hypernet-Guided Feature Pyramid network for mixed-exposure correction	2025-01-09	Show Recent advancements in image translation for enhancing mixed-exposure images have demonstrated the transformative potential of deep learning algorithms. However, addressing extreme exposure variations in images remains a significant challenge due to the inherent complexity and contrast inconsistencies across regions. Current methods often struggle to adapt effectively to these variations, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose HipyrNet, a novel approach that integrates a HyperNetwork within a Laplacian Pyramid-based framework to tackle the challenges of mixed-exposure image enhancement. The inclusion of a HyperNetwork allows the model to adapt to these exposure variations. HyperNetworks dynamically generates weights for another network, allowing dynamic changes during deployment. In our model, the HyperNetwork employed is used to predict optimal kernels for Feature Pyramid decomposition, which enables a tailored and adaptive decomposition process for each input image. Our enhanced translational network incorporates multiscale decomposition and reconstruction, leveraging dynamic kernel prediction to capture and manipulate features across varying scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HipyrNet outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios with extreme exposure variations, achieving superior results in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Our approach sets a new benchmark for mixed-exposure image enhancement, paving the way for future research in adaptive image translation.		None
IPDN: Image-enhanced Prompt Decoding Network for 3D Referring Expression Segmentation	2025-01-09	Show 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES) aims to segment point cloud scenes based on a given expression. However, existing 3D-RES approaches face two major challenges: feature ambiguity and intent ambiguity. Feature ambiguity arises from information loss or distortion during point cloud acquisition due to limitations such as lighting and viewpoint. Intent ambiguity refers to the model's equal treatment of all queries during the decoding process, lacking top-down task-specific guidance. In this paper, we introduce an Image enhanced Prompt Decoding Network (IPDN), which leverages multi-view images and task-driven information to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities. To address feature ambiguity, we propose the Multi-view Semantic Embedding (MSE) module, which injects multi-view 2D image information into the 3D scene and compensates for potential spatial information loss. To tackle intent ambiguity, we designed a Prompt-Aware Decoder (PAD) that guides the decoding process by deriving task-driven signals from the interaction between the expression and visual features. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that IPDN outperforms the state-ofthe-art by 1.9 and 4.2 points in mIoU metrics on the 3D-RES and 3D-GRES tasks, respectively.	AAAI 2025	None
FrontierNet: Learning Visual Cues to Explore	2025-01-08	Show Exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots; it allows them to actively reason and decide on what new data to acquire for tasks such as mapping, object discovery, and environmental assessment. Existing methods, such as frontier-based methods, rely heavily on 3D map operations, which are limited by map quality and often overlook valuable context from visual cues. This work aims at leveraging 2D visual cues for efficient autonomous exploration, addressing the limitations of extracting goal poses from a 3D map. We propose a image-only frontier-based exploration system, with FrontierNet as a core component developed in this work. FrontierNet is a learning-based model that (i) detects frontiers, and (ii) predicts their information gain, from posed RGB images enhanced by monocular depth priors. Our approach provides an alternative to existing 3D-dependent exploration systems, achieving a 16% improvement in early-stage exploration efficiency, as validated through extensive simulations and real-world experiments.		None
DEFormer: DCT-driven Enhancement Transformer for Low-light Image and Dark Vision	2025-01-08	Show Low-light image enhancement restores the colors and details of a single image and improves high-level visual tasks. However, restoring the lost details in the dark area is still a challenge relying only on the RGB domain. In this paper, we delve into frequency as a new clue into the model and propose a DCT-driven enhancement transformer (DEFormer) framework. First, we propose a learnable frequency branch (LFB) for frequency enhancement contains DCT processing and curvature-based frequency enhancement (CFE) to represent frequency features. Additionally, we propose a cross domain fusion (CDF) to reduce the differences between the RGB domain and the frequency domain. Our DEFormer has achieved superior results on the LOL and MIT-Adobe FiveK datasets, improving the dark detection performance.	Accepted by ICASSP	None
Recognition-Oriented Low-Light Image Enhancement based on Global and Pixelwise Optimization	2025-01-08	Show In this paper, we propose a novel low-light image enhancement method aimed at improving the performance of recognition models. Despite recent advances in deep learning, the recognition of images under low-light conditions remains a challenge. Although existing low-light image enhancement methods have been developed to improve image visibility for human vision, they do not specifically focus on enhancing recognition model performance. Our proposed low-light image enhancement method consists of two key modules: the Global Enhance Module, which adjusts the overall brightness and color balance of the input image, and the Pixelwise Adjustment Module, which refines image features at the pixel level. These modules are trained to enhance input images to improve downstream recognition model performance effectively. Notably, the proposed method can be applied as a frontend filter to improve low-light recognition performance without requiring retraining of downstream recognition models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the performance of pretrained recognition models under low-light conditions and its effectiveness.	accep... accepted to VISAPP2025	None
Adaptive deep learning framework for robust unsupervised underwater image enhancement	2025-01-07	Show One of the main challenges in deep learning-based underwater image enhancement is the limited availability of high-quality training data. Underwater images are difficult to capture and are often of poor quality due to the distortion and loss of colour and contrast in water. This makes it difficult to train supervised deep learning models on large and diverse datasets, which can limit the model's performance. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach to supervised underwater image enhancement. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised underwater image enhancement framework that employs a conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE) to train a deep learning model with probabilistic adaptive instance normalization (PAdaIN) and statistically guided multi-colour space stretch that produces realistic underwater images. The resulting framework is composed of a U-Net as a feature extractor and a PAdaIN to encode the uncertainty, which we call UDnet. To improve the visual quality of the images generated by UDnet, we use a statistically guided multi-colour space stretch module that ensures visual consistency with the input image and provides an alternative to training using a ground truth image. The proposed model does not need manual human annotation and can learn with a limited amount of data and achieves state-of-the-art results on underwater images. We evaluated our proposed framework on eight publicly-available datasets. The results show that our proposed framework yields competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art approaches in quantitative as well as qualitative metrics. Code available at https://github.com/alzayats/UDnet .	25 pa... 25 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in Expert Systems with Applications	Code Link
Conditional Consistency Guided Image Translation and Enhancement	2025-01-03	Show Consistency models have emerged as a promising alternative to diffusion models, offering high-quality generative capabilities through single-step sample generation. However, their application to multi-domain image translation tasks, such as cross-modal translation and low-light image enhancement remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Conditional Consistency Models (CCMs) for multi-domain image translation by incorporating additional conditional inputs. We implement these modifications by introducing task-specific conditional inputs that guide the denoising process, ensuring that the generated outputs retain structural and contextual information from the corresponding input domain. We evaluate CCMs on 10 different datasets demonstrating their effectiveness in producing high-quality translated images across multiple domains. Code is available at https://github.com/amilbhagat/Conditional-Consistency-Models.	6 pag... 6 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables, The first two authors contributed equally	Code Link
Generalized Task-Driven Medical Image Quality Enhancement with Gradient Promotion	2025-01-02	Show Thanks to the recent achievements in task-driven image quality enhancement (IQE) models like ESTR, the image enhancement model and the visual recognition model can mutually enhance each other's quantitation while producing high-quality processed images that are perceivable by our human vision systems. However, existing task-driven IQE models tend to overlook an underlying fact -- different levels of vision tasks have varying and sometimes conflicting requirements of image features. To address this problem, this paper proposes a generalized gradient promotion (GradProm) training strategy for task-driven IQE of medical images. Specifically, we partition a task-driven IQE system into two sub-models, i.e., a mainstream model for image enhancement and an auxiliary model for visual recognition. During training, GradProm updates only parameters of the image enhancement model using gradients of the visual recognition model and the image enhancement model, but only when gradients of these two sub-models are aligned in the same direction, which is measured by their cosine similarity. In case gradients of these two sub-models are not in the same direction, GradProm only uses the gradient of the image enhancement model to update its parameters. Theoretically, we have proved that the optimization direction of the image enhancement model will not be biased by the auxiliary visual recognition model under the implementation of GradProm. Empirically, extensive experimental results on four public yet challenging medical image datasets demonstrated the superior performance of GradProm over existing state-of-the-art methods.	This ... This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	None
ALEN: A Dual-Approach for Uniform and Non-Uniform Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-31	Show Low-light image enhancement is an important task in computer vision, essential for improving the visibility and quality of images captured in non-optimal lighting conditions. Inadequate illumination can lead to significant information loss and poor image quality, impacting various applications such as surveillance. photography, or even autonomous driving. In this regard, automated methods have been developed to automatically adjust illumination in the image for a better visual perception. Current enhancement techniques often use specific datasets to enhance low-light images, but still present challenges when adapting to diverse real-world conditions, where illumination degradation may be localized to specific regions. To address this challenge, the Adaptive Light Enhancement Network (ALEN) is introduced, whose main approach is the use of a classification mechanism to determine whether local or global illumination enhancement is required. Subsequently, estimator networks adjust illumination based on this classification and simultaneously enhance color fidelity. ALEN integrates the Light Classification Network (LCNet) for illuminance categorization, complemented by the Single-Channel Network (SCNet), and Multi-Channel Network (MCNet) for precise estimation of illumination and color, respectively. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets for low-light conditions were carried out to underscore ALEN's robust generalization capabilities, demonstrating superior performance in both quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments when compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. The ALEN not only enhances image quality in terms of visual perception but also represents an advancement in high-level vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, as presented in this work. The code of this method is available at https://github.com/xingyumex/ALEN	Minor... Minor updates and corrections	Code Link
Retinex-RAWMamba: Bridging Demosaicing and Denoising for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement	2024-12-31	Show Low-light image enhancement, particularly in cross-domain tasks such as mapping from the raw domain to the sRGB domain, remains a significant challenge. Many deep learning-based methods have been developed to address this issue and have shown promising results in recent years. However, single-stage methods, which attempt to unify the complex mapping across both domains, leading to limited denoising performance. In contrast, two-stage approaches typically decompose a raw image with color filter arrays (CFA) into a four-channel RGGB format before feeding it into a neural network. However, this strategy overlooks the critical role of demosaicing within the Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, leading to color distortions under varying lighting conditions, especially in low-light scenarios. To address these issues, we design a novel Mamba scanning mechanism, called RAWMamba, to effectively handle raw images with different CFAs. Furthermore, we present a Retinex Decomposition Module (RDM) grounded in Retinex prior, which decouples illumination from reflectance to facilitate more effective denoising and automatic non-linear exposure correction. By bridging demosaicing and denoising, better raw image enhancement is achieved. Experimental evaluations conducted on public datasets SID and MCR demonstrate that our proposed RAWMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain mapping.		None
Dual Degradation-Inspired Deep Unfolding Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-31	Show Although low-light image enhancement has achieved great stride based on deep enhancement models, most of them mainly stress on enhancement performance via an elaborated black-box network and rarely explore the physical significance of enhancement models. Towards this issue, we propose a Dual degrAdation-inSpired deep Unfolding network, termed DASUNet, for low-light image enhancement. Specifically, we construct a dual degradation model (DDM) to explicitly simulate the deterioration mechanism of low-light images. It learns two distinct image priors via considering degradation specificity between luminance and chrominance spaces. To make the proposed scheme tractable, we design an alternating optimization solution to solve the proposed DDM. Further, the designed solution is unfolded into a specified deep network, imitating the iteration updating rules, to form DASUNet. Based on different specificity in two spaces, we design two customized Transformer block to model different priors. Additionally, a space aggregation module (SAM) is presented to boost the interaction of two degradation models. Extensive experiments on multiple popular low-light image datasets validate the effectiveness of DASUNet compared to canonical state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement methods. Our source code and pretrained model will be publicly available.		None
Low-Light Image Enhancement via Generative Perceptual Priors	2024-12-30	Show Although significant progress has been made in enhancing visibility, retrieving texture details, and mitigating noise in Low-Light (LL) images, the challenge persists in applying current Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods to real-world scenarios, primarily due to the diverse illumination conditions encountered. Furthermore, the quest for generating enhancements that are visually realistic and attractive remains an underexplored realm. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel \textbf{LLIE} framework with the guidance of \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{P}erceptual \textbf{P}riors (\textbf{GPP-LLIE}) derived from vision-language models (VLMs). Specifically, we first propose a pipeline that guides VLMs to assess multiple visual attributes of the LL image and quantify the assessment to output the global and local perceptual priors. Subsequently, to incorporate these generative perceptual priors to benefit LLIE, we introduce a transformer-based backbone in the diffusion process, and develop a new layer normalization (\textit{\textbf{GPP-LN}}) and an attention mechanism (\textit{\textbf{LPP-Attn}}) guided by global and local perceptual priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms current SOTA methods on paired LL datasets and exhibits superior generalization on real-world data. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/LowLevelAI/GPP-LLIE}.	Accep... Accepted by AAAI 2025	Code Link
Injecting Explainability and Lightweight Design into Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection Systems	2024-12-28	Show Weakly Supervised Monitoring Anomaly Detection (WSMAD) utilizes weak supervision learning to identify anomalies, a critical task for smart city monitoring. However, existing multimodal approaches often fail to meet the real-time and interpretability requirements of edge devices due to their complexity. This paper presents TCVADS (Two-stage Cross-modal Video Anomaly Detection System), which leverages knowledge distillation and cross-modal contrastive learning to enable efficient, accurate, and interpretable anomaly detection on edge devices.TCVADS operates in two stages: coarse-grained rapid classification and fine-grained detailed analysis. In the first stage, TCVADS extracts features from video frames and inputs them into a time series analysis module, which acts as the teacher model. Insights are then transferred via knowledge distillation to a simplified convolutional network (student model) for binary classification. Upon detecting an anomaly, the second stage is triggered, employing a fine-grained multi-class classification model. This stage uses CLIP for cross-modal contrastive learning with text and images, enhancing interpretability and achieving refined classification through specially designed triplet textual relationships. Experimental results demonstrate that TCVADS significantly outperforms existing methods in model performance, detection efficiency, and interpretability, offering valuable contributions to smart city monitoring applications.	IEEE ... IEEE TETC-CS (Under review)	None
ERUP-YOLO: Enhancing Object Detection Robustness for Adverse Weather Condition by Unified Image-Adaptive Processing	2024-12-28	Show We propose an image-adaptive object detection method for adverse weather conditions such as fog and low-light. Our framework employs differentiable preprocessing filters to perform image enhancement suitable for later-stage object detections. Our framework introduces two differentiable filters: a B'ezier curve-based pixel-wise (BPW) filter and a kernel-based local (KBL) filter. These filters unify the functions of classical image processing filters and improve performance of object detection. We also propose a domain-agnostic data augmentation strategy using the BPW filter. Our method does not require data-specific customization of the filter combinations, parameter ranges, and data augmentation. We evaluate our proposed approach, called Enhanced Robustness by Unified Image Processing (ERUP)-YOLO, by applying it to the YOLOv3 detector. Experiments on adverse weather datasets demonstrate that our proposed filters match or exceed the expressiveness of conventional methods and our ERUP-YOLO achieved superior performance in a wide range of adverse weather conditions, including fog and low-light conditions.	Accep... Accepted to WACV 2025	None
SDM-Car: A Dataset for Small and Dim Moving Vehicles Detection in Satellite Videos	2024-12-24	Show Vehicle detection and tracking in satellite video is essential in remote sensing (RS) applications. However, upon the statistical analysis of existing datasets, we find that the dim vehicles with low radiation intensity and limited contrast against the background are rarely annotated, which leads to the poor effect of existing approaches in detecting moving vehicles under low radiation conditions. In this paper, we address the challenge by building a \textbf{S}mall and \textbf{D}im \textbf{M}oving Cars (SDM-Car) dataset with a multitude of annotations for dim vehicles in satellite videos, which is collected by the Luojia 3-01 satellite and comprises 99 high-quality videos. Furthermore, we propose a method based on image enhancement and attention mechanisms to improve the detection accuracy of dim vehicles, serving as a benchmark for evaluating the dataset. Finally, we assess the performance of several representative methods on SDM-Car and present insightful findings. The dataset is openly available at https://github.com/TanedaM/SDM-Car.	5 pag... 5 pages, 7 figures, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters	Code Link
NightHaze: Nighttime Image Dehazing via Self-Prior Learning	2024-12-23	Show Masked autoencoder (MAE) shows that severe augmentation during training produces robust representations for high-level tasks. This paper brings the MAE-like framework to nighttime image enhancement, demonstrating that severe augmentation during training produces strong network priors that are resilient to real-world night haze degradations. We propose a novel nighttime image dehazing method with self-prior learning. Our main novelty lies in the design of severe augmentation, which allows our model to learn robust priors. Unlike MAE that uses masking, we leverage two key challenging factors of nighttime images as augmentation: light effects and noise. During training, we intentionally degrade clear images by blending them with light effects as well as by adding noise, and subsequently restore the clear images. This enables our model to learn clear background priors. By increasing the noise values to approach as high as the pixel intensity values of the glow and light effect blended images, our augmentation becomes severe, resulting in stronger priors. While our self-prior learning is considerably effective in suppressing glow and revealing details of background scenes, in some cases, there are still some undesired artifacts that remain, particularly in the forms of over-suppression. To address these artifacts, we propose a self-refinement module based on the semi-supervised teacher-student framework. Our NightHaze, especially our MAE-like self-prior learning, shows that models trained with severe augmentation effectively improve the visibility of input haze images, approaching the clarity of clear nighttime images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our NightHaze achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing nighttime image dehazing methods by a substantial margin of 15.5% for MUSIQ and 23.5% for ClipIQA.	Accep... Accepted by AAAI 2025. Project page: https://bb12346.github.io/NightHaze/	Code Link
ECAFormer: Low-light Image Enhancement using Cross Attention	2024-12-22	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is critical in computer vision. Existing LLIE methods often fail to discover the underlying relationships between different sub-components, causing the loss of complementary information between multiple modules and network layers, ultimately resulting in the loss of image details. To beat this shortage, we design a hierarchical mutual Enhancement via a Cross Attention transformer (ECAFormer), which introduces an architecture that enables concurrent propagation and interaction of multiple features. The model preserves detailed information by introducing a Dual Multi-head self-attention (DMSA), which leverages visual and semantic features across different scales, allowing them to guide and complement each other. Besides, a Cross-Scale DMSA block is introduced to capture the residual connection, integrating cross-layer information to further enhance image detail. Experimental results show that ECAFormer reaches competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, yielding nearly a 3% improvement in PSNR over the suboptimal method, demonstrating the effectiveness of information interaction in LLIE.		None
Rethinking Model Redundancy for Low-light Image Enhancement	2024-12-21	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental task in computational photography, aiming to improve illumination, reduce noise, and enhance the image quality of low-light images. While recent advancements primarily focus on customizing complex neural network models, we have observed significant redundancy in these models, limiting further performance improvement. In this paper, we investigate and rethink the model redundancy for LLIE, identifying parameter harmfulness and parameter uselessness. Inspired by the rethinking, we propose two innovative techniques to mitigate model redundancy while improving the LLIE performance: Attention Dynamic Reallocation (ADR) and Parameter Orthogonal Generation (POG). ADR dynamically reallocates appropriate attention based on original attention, thereby mitigating parameter harmfulness. POG learns orthogonal basis embeddings of parameters and prevents degradation to static parameters, thereby mitigating parameter uselessness. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our techniques. We will release the code to the public.		None
Rethinking the Atmospheric Scattering-driven Attention via Channel and Gamma Correction Priors for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-20	Show Enhancing low-light images remains a critical challenge in computer vision, as does designing lightweight models for edge devices that can handle the computational demands of deep learning. In this article, we introduce an extended version of the Channel-Prior and Gamma-Estimation Network (CPGA-Net), termed CPGA-Net+, which incorporates an attention mechanism driven by a reformulated Atmospheric Scattering Model and effectively addresses both global and local image processing through Plug-in Attention with gamma correction. These innovations enable CPGA-Net+ to achieve superior performance on image enhancement tasks for supervised and unsupervised learning, surpassing lightweight state-of-the-art methods with high efficiency. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that our approach inherently decomposes the enhancement process into restoration and lightening stages, aligning with the fundamental image degradation model. To further optimize efficiency, we introduce a block simplification technique that reduces computational costs by more than two-thirds. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of CPGA-Net+ and highlight its potential for applications in resource-constrained environments.	This ... This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication	None
SeagrassFinder: Deep Learning for Eelgrass Detection and Coverage Estimation in the Wild	2024-12-20	Show Seagrass meadows play a crucial role in marine ecosystems, providing important services such as carbon sequestration, water quality improvement, and habitat provision. Monitoring the distribution and abundance of seagrass is essential for environmental impact assessments and conservation efforts. However, the current manual methods of analyzing underwater video transects to assess seagrass coverage are time-consuming and subjective. This work explores the use of deep learning models to automate the process of seagrass detection and coverage estimation from underwater video data. A dataset of over 8,300 annotated underwater images was created, and several deep learning architectures, including ResNet, InceptionNetV3, DenseNet, and Vision Transformer, were evaluated for the task of binary classification of Eelgrass Present'' and Eelgrass Absent'' images. The results demonstrate that deep learning models, particularly the Vision Transformer, can achieve high performance in predicting eelgrass presence, with AUROC scores exceeding 0.95 on the final test dataset. The use of transfer learning and the application of the Deep WaveNet underwater image enhancement model further improved the models' capabilities. The proposed methodology allows for the efficient processing of large volumes of video data, enabling the acquisition of much more detailed information on seagrass distributions compared to current manual methods. This information is crucial for environmental impact assessments and monitoring programs, as seagrasses are important indicators of coastal ecosystem health. Overall, this project demonstrates the value that deep learning can bring to the field of marine ecology and environmental monitoring.		None
Fed-AugMix: Balancing Privacy and Utility via Data Augmentation	2024-12-18	Show Gradient leakage attacks pose a significant threat to the privacy guarantees of federated learning. While distortion-based protection mechanisms are commonly employed to mitigate this issue, they often lead to notable performance degradation. Existing methods struggle to preserve model performance while ensuring privacy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation-based framework designed to achieve a favorable privacy-utility trade-off, with the potential to enhance model performance in certain cases. Our framework incorporates the AugMix algorithm at the client level, enabling data augmentation with controllable severity. By integrating the Jensen-Shannon divergence into the loss function, we embed the distortion introduced by AugMix into the model gradients, effectively safeguarding privacy against deep leakage attacks. Moreover, the JS divergence promotes model consistency across different augmentations of the same image, enhancing both robustness and performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method in protecting privacy. Furthermore, our approach maintains, and in some cases improves, model performance, showcasing its ability to achieve a robust privacy-utility trade-off.		None
Expanded Comprehensive Robotic Cholecystectomy Dataset (CRCD)	2024-12-16	Show In recent years, the application of machine learning to minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has attracted considerable interest. Datasets are critical to the use of such techniques. This paper presents a unique dataset recorded during ex vivo pseudo-cholecystectomy procedures on pig livers using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). Unlike existing datasets, it addresses a critical gap by providing comprehensive kinematic data, recordings of all pedal inputs, and offers a time-stamped record of the endoscope's movements. This expanded version also includes segmentation and keypoint annotations of images, enhancing its utility for computer vision applications. Contributed by seven surgeons with varied backgrounds and experience levels that are provided as a part of this expanded version, the dataset is an important new resource for surgical robotics research. It enables the development of advanced methods for evaluating surgeon skills, tools for providing better context awareness, and automation of surgical tasks. Our work overcomes the limitations of incomplete recordings and imprecise kinematic data found in other datasets. To demonstrate the potential of the dataset for advancing automation in surgical robotics, we introduce two models that predict clutch usage and camera activation, a 3D scene reconstruction example, and the results from our keypoint and segmentation models.	Prepr... Preprint of an article accepted in Journal of Medical Robotics Research (2024). The metadata will be updated once it is published	None
Deep Joint Unrolling for Deblurring and Low-Light Image Enhancement (JUDE)	2024-12-16	Show Low-light and blurring issues are prevalent when capturing photos at night, often due to the use of long exposure to address dim environments. Addressing these joint problems can be challenging and error-prone if an end-to-end model is trained without incorporating an appropriate physical model. In this paper, we introduce JUDE, a Deep Joint Unrolling for Deblurring and Low-Light Image Enhancement, inspired by the image physical model. Based on Retinex theory and the blurring model, the low-light blurry input is iteratively deblurred and decomposed, producing sharp low-light reflectance and illuminance through an unrolling mechanism. Additionally, we incorporate various modules to estimate the initial blur kernel, enhance brightness, and eliminate noise in the final image. Comprehensive experiments on LOL-Blur and Real-LOL-Blur demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively.	10 pages	None
Training-and-Prompt-Free General Painterly Harmonization via Zero-Shot Disentenglement on Style and Content References	2024-12-15	Show Painterly image harmonization aims at seamlessly blending disparate visual elements within a single image. However, previous approaches often struggle due to limitations in training data or reliance on additional prompts, leading to inharmonious and content-disrupted output. To surmount these hurdles, we design a Training-and-prompt-Free General Painterly Harmonization method (TF-GPH). TF-GPH incorporates a novel Similarity Disentangle Mask'', which disentangles the foreground content and background image by redirecting their attention to corresponding reference images, enhancing the attention mechanism for multi-image inputs. Additionally, we propose a Similarity Reweighting'' mechanism to balance harmonization between stylization and content preservation. This mechanism minimizes content disruption by prioritizing the content-similar features within the given background style reference. Finally, we address the deficiencies in existing benchmarks by proposing novel range-based evaluation metrics and a new benchmark to better reflect real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method in all benchmarks. More detailed in https://github.com/BlueDyee/TF-GPH.		Code Link
AllWeatherNet:Unified Image Enhancement for Autonomous Driving under Adverse Weather and Lowlight-conditions	2024-12-14	Show Adverse conditions like snow, rain, nighttime, and fog, pose challenges for autonomous driving perception systems. Existing methods have limited effectiveness in improving essential computer vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, and often focus on only one specific condition, such as removing rain or translating nighttime images into daytime ones. To address these limitations, we propose a method to improve the visual quality and clarity degraded by such adverse conditions. Our method, AllWeather-Net, utilizes a novel hierarchical architecture to enhance images across all adverse conditions. This architecture incorporates information at three semantic levels: scene, object, and texture, by discriminating patches at each level. Furthermore, we introduce a Scaled Illumination-aware Attention Mechanism (SIAM) that guides the learning towards road elements critical for autonomous driving perception. SIAM exhibits robustness, remaining unaffected by changes in weather conditions or environmental scenes. AllWeather-Net effectively transforms images into normal weather and daytime scenes, demonstrating superior image enhancement results and subsequently enhancing the performance of semantic segmentation, with up to a 5.3% improvement in mIoU in the trained domain. We also show our model's generalization ability by applying it to unseen domains without re-training, achieving up to 3.9% mIoU improvement. Code can be accessed at: https://github.com/Jumponthemoon/AllWeatherNet.	ICPR ... ICPR 2024, Piero Zamperoni Overall Best Student Paper Award	Code Link
Physics-Inspired Synthesized Underwater Image Dataset	2024-12-11	Show This paper introduces the physics-inspired synthesized underwater image dataset (PHISWID), a dataset tailored for enhancing underwater image processing through physics-inspired image synthesis. For underwater image enhancement, data-driven approaches (e.g., deep neural networks) typically demand extensive datasets, yet acquiring paired clean and degraded underwater images poses significant challenges. Existing datasets have limited contributions to image enhancement due to lack of physics models, publicity, and ground-truth images. PHISWID addresses these issues by offering a set of paired ground-truth (atmospheric) and underwater images synthetically degraded by color degradation and marine snow artifacts. Generating underwater images from atmospheric RGB-D images based on physical models provides pairs of real-world ground-truth and degraded images. Our synthetic approach generates a large quantity of the pairs, enabling effective training of deep neural networks and objective image quality assessment. Through benchmark experiment with some datasets and image enhance methods, we validate that our dataset can improve the image enhancement performance. Our dataset, which is publicly available, contributes to the development in underwater image processing.		None
Leveraging Content and Context Cues for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-10	Show Low-light conditions have an adverse impact on machine cognition, limiting the performance of computer vision systems in real life. Since low-light data is limited and difficult to annotate, we focus on image processing to enhance low-light images and improve the performance of any downstream task model, instead of fine-tuning each of the models which can be prohibitively expensive. We propose to improve the existing zero-reference low-light enhancement by leveraging the CLIP model to capture image prior and for semantic guidance. Specifically, we propose a data augmentation strategy to learn an image prior via prompt learning, based on image sampling, to learn the image prior without any need for paired or unpaired normal-light data. Next, we propose a semantic guidance strategy that maximally takes advantage of existing low-light annotation by introducing both content and context cues about the image training patches. We experimentally show, in a qualitative study, that the proposed prior and semantic guidance help to improve the overall image contrast and hue, as well as improve background-foreground discrimination, resulting in reduced over-saturation and noise over-amplification, common in related zero-reference methods. As we target machine cognition, rather than rely on assuming the correlation between human perception and downstream task performance, we conduct and present an ablation study and comparison with related zero-reference methods in terms of task-based performance across many low-light datasets, including image classification, object and face detection, showing the effectiveness of our proposed method.	Accep... Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia	None
Analytical-Heuristic Modeling and Optimization for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-10	Show Low-light image enhancement remains an open problem, and the new wave of artificial intelligence is at the center of this problem. This work describes the use of genetic algorithms for optimizing analytical models that can improve the visualization of images with poor light. Genetic algorithms are part of metaheuristic approaches, which proved helpful in solving challenging optimization tasks. We propose two analytical methods combined with optimization reasoning to approach a solution to the physical and computational aspects of transforming dark images into visible ones. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach ranks at the top among 26 state-of-the-art algorithms in the LOL benchmark. The results show evidence that a simple genetic algorithm combined with analytical reasoning can defeat the current mainstream in a challenging computer vision task through controlled experiments and objective comparisons. This work opens interesting new research avenues for the swarm and evolutionary computation community and others interested in analytical and heuristic reasoning.	26 pa... 26 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables, 34 references	None
Modeling Dual-Exposure Quad-Bayer Patterns for Joint Denoising and Deblurring	2024-12-10	Show Image degradation caused by noise and blur remains a persistent challenge in imaging systems, stemming from limitations in both hardware and methodology. Single-image solutions face an inherent tradeoff between noise reduction and motion blur. While short exposures can capture clear motion, they suffer from noise amplification. Long exposures reduce noise but introduce blur. Learning-based single-image enhancers tend to be over-smooth due to the limited information. Multi-image solutions using burst mode avoid this tradeoff by capturing more spatial-temporal information but often struggle with misalignment from camera/scene motion. To address these limitations, we propose a physical-model-based image restoration approach leveraging a novel dual-exposure Quad-Bayer pattern sensor. By capturing pairs of short and long exposures at the same starting point but with varying durations, this method integrates complementary noise-blur information within a single image. We further introduce a Quad-Bayer synthesis method (B2QB) to simulate sensor data from Bayer patterns to facilitate training. Based on this dual-exposure sensor model, we design a hierarchical convolutional neural network called QRNet to recover high-quality RGB images. The network incorporates input enhancement blocks and multi-level feature extraction to improve restoration quality. Experiments demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art deblurring and denoising methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The code, model, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/zhaoyuzhi/QRNet.	accep... accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)	Code Link
EchoSim4D: A Proof-of-Concept Gamified XR Echocardiography Training Simulator for Neonates using 4D Ultrasound Volume	2024-12-09	Show Neonatal echocardiography is vital for early detection of heart anomalies in newborns, enabling timely, non-invasive interventions where 4D ultrasound, adds the dimension of time to 3D imaging, enhances diagnostic capabilities by visualizing real-time heart dynamics. However, training for 4D neonatal echocardiography is limited by the lack of simulators that support 4D Ultrasound volume visualization within gamified environments. This paper introduces EchoSim4D, an XR-based simulator leveraging novel pipeline for visualizing 4D volume data in Unity, incorporating real-time volume reconstruction, and a preloaded version optimized for low-end systems. EchoSim4D integrates a sensor-equipped manikin and a custom 3D-printed transducer with a 6-DOF sensor, replicating the precise probe maneuvers necessary for neonatal echocardiography. In a validation study with postgraduate medical students (0-5 years of experience), supervised by a domain expert, EchoSim4D demonstrated high visual fidelity and training efficacy. Findings suggest that 4D visualization techniques hold significant potential for advancing medical training in neonatal echocardiography.	12 pa... 12 pages, 10 figures, work in progress	None
PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators	2024-12-07	Show Due to the light absorption and scattering induced by the water medium, underwater images usually suffer from some degradation problems, such as low contrast, color distortion, and blurring details, which aggravate the difficulty of downstream underwater understanding tasks. Therefore, how to obtain clear and visually pleasant images has become a common concern of people, and the task of underwater image enhancement (UIE) has also emerged as the times require. Among existing UIE methods, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based methods perform well in visual aesthetics, while the physical model-based methods have better scene adaptability. Inheriting the advantages of the above two types of models, we propose a physical model-guided GAN model for UIE in this paper, referred to as PUGAN. The entire network is under the GAN architecture. On the one hand, we design a Parameters Estimation subnetwork (Par-subnet) to learn the parameters for physical model inversion, and use the generated color enhancement image as auxiliary information for the Two-Stream Interaction Enhancement sub-network (TSIE-subnet). Meanwhile, we design a Degradation Quantization (DQ) module in TSIE-subnet to quantize scene degradation, thereby achieving reinforcing enhancement of key regions. On the other hand, we design the Dual-Discriminators for the style-content adversarial constraint, promoting the authenticity and visual aesthetics of the results. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our PUGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.	8 pag... 8 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2023	None
Noise Self-Regression: A New Learning Paradigm to Enhance Low-Light Images Without Task-Related Data	2024-12-06	Show Deep learning-based low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a task of leveraging deep neural networks to enhance the image illumination while keeping the image content unchanged. From the perspective of training data, existing methods complete the LLIE task driven by one of the following three data types: paired data, unpaired data and zero-reference data. Each type of these data-driven methods has its own advantages, e.g., zero-reference data-based methods have very low requirements on training data and can meet the human needs in many scenarios. In this paper, we leverage pure Gaussian noise to complete the LLIE task, which further reduces the requirements for training data in LLIE tasks and can be used as another alternative in practical use. Specifically, we propose Noise SElf-Regression (NoiSER) without access to any task-related data, simply learns a convolutional neural network equipped with an instance-normalization layer by taking a random noise image, $\mathcal{N}(0,\sigma^2)$ for each pixel, as both input and output for each training pair, and then the low-light image is fed to the trained network for predicting the normal-light image. Technically, an intuitive explanation for its effectiveness is as follows: 1) the self-regression reconstructs the contrast between adjacent pixels of the input image, 2) the instance-normalization layer may naturally remediate the overall magnitude/lighting of the input image, and 3) the $\mathcal{N}(0,\sigma^2)$ assumption for each pixel enforces the output image to follow the well-known gray-world hypothesis when the image size is big enough. Compared to current state-of-the-art LLIE methods with access to different task-related data, NoiSER is highly competitive in enhancement quality, yet with a much smaller model size, and much lower training and inference cost. Besides, NoiSER also excels in mitigating overexposure and handling joint tasks.		None
Joint Image De-noising and Enhancement for Satellite-Based SAR	2024-12-03	Show The reconstructed images from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data suffer from multiplicative noise as well as low contrast level. These two factors impact the quality of the SAR images significantly and prevent any attempt to extract valuable information from the processed data. The necessity for mitigating these effects in the field of SAR imaging is of high importance. Therefore, in this paper, we address the aforementioned issues and propose a technique to handle these shortcomings simultaneously. In fact, we combine the de-noising and contrast enhancement processes into a unified algorithm. The image enhancement is performed based on the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) technique. The verification of the proposed algorithm is performed by experimental results based on the data that has been collected from the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite which operates in strip-map mode.		None
Phaseformer: Phase-based Attention Mechanism for Underwater Image Restoration and Beyond	2024-12-02	Show Quality degradation is observed in underwater images due to the effects of light refraction and absorption by water, leading to issues like color cast, haziness, and limited visibility. This degradation negatively affects the performance of autonomous underwater vehicles used in marine applications. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight phase-based transformer network with 1.77M parameters for underwater image restoration (UIR). Our approach focuses on effectively extracting non-contaminated features using a phase-based self-attention mechanism. We also introduce an optimized phase attention block to restore structural information by propagating prominent attentive features from the input. We evaluate our method on both synthetic (UIEB, UFO-120) and real-world (UIEB, U45, UCCS, SQUID) underwater image datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate its effectiveness for low-light image enhancement using the LOL dataset. Through extensive ablation studies and comparative analysis, it is clear that the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.	8 pag... 8 pages, 8 figures, conference	None
BiCo-Fusion: Bidirectional Complementary LiDAR-Camera Fusion for Semantic- and Spatial-Aware 3D Object Detection	2024-12-01	Show 3D object detection is an important task that has been widely applied in autonomous driving. To perform this task, a new trend is to fuse multi-modal inputs, i.e., LiDAR and camera. Under such a trend, recent methods fuse these two modalities by unifying them in the same 3D space. However, during direct fusion in a unified space, the drawbacks of both modalities (LiDAR features struggle with detailed semantic information and the camera lacks accurate 3D spatial information) are also preserved, diluting semantic and spatial awareness of the final unified representation. To address the issue, this letter proposes a novel bidirectional complementary LiDAR-camera fusion framework, called BiCo-Fusion that can achieve robust semantic- and spatial-aware 3D object detection. The key insight is to fuse LiDAR and camera features in a bidirectional complementary way to enhance the semantic awareness of the LiDAR and the 3D spatial awareness of the camera. The enhanced features from both modalities are then adaptively fused to build a semantic- and spatial-aware unified representation. Specifically, we introduce Pre-Fusion consisting of a Voxel Enhancement Module (VEM) to enhance the semantic awareness of voxel features from 2D camera features and Image Enhancement Module (IEM) to enhance the 3D spatial awareness of camera features from 3D voxel features. We then introduce Unified Fusion (U-Fusion) to adaptively fuse the enhanced features from the last stage to build a unified representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our BiCo-Fusion against the prior arts. Project page: https://t-ys.github.io/BiCo-Fusion/.	8 pages, 5 figures	Code Link
DMFourLLIE: Dual-Stage and Multi-Branch Fourier Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement	2024-12-01	Show In the Fourier frequency domain, luminance information is primarily encoded in the amplitude component, while spatial structure information is significantly contained within the phase component. Existing low-light image enhancement techniques using Fourier transform have mainly focused on amplifying the amplitude component and simply replicating the phase component, an approach that often leads to color distortions and noise issues. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Stage Multi-Branch Fourier Low-Light Image Enhancement (DMFourLLIE) framework to address these limitations by emphasizing the phase component's role in preserving image structure and detail. The first stage integrates structural information from infrared images to enhance the phase component and employs a luminance-attention mechanism in the luminance-chrominance color space to precisely control amplitude enhancement. The second stage combines multi-scale and Fourier convolutional branches for robust image reconstruction, effectively recovering spatial structures and textures. This dual-branch joint optimization process ensures that complex image information is retained, overcoming the limitations of previous methods that neglected the interplay between amplitude and phase. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that DMFourLLIE outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/bywlzts/DMFourLLIE.	Accep... Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2024	Code Link
MambaNUT: Nighttime UAV Tracking via Mamba and Adaptive Curriculum Learning	2024-12-01	Show Harnessing low-light enhancement and domain adaptation, nighttime UAV tracking has made substantial strides. However, over-reliance on image enhancement, scarcity of high-quality nighttime data, and neglecting the relationship between daytime and nighttime trackers, which hinders the development of an end-to-end trainable framework. Moreover, current CNN-based trackers have limited receptive fields, leading to suboptimal performance, while ViT-based trackers demand heavy computational resources due to their reliance on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel pure Mamba-based tracking framework (\textbf{MambaNUT}) that employs a state space model with linear complexity as its backbone, incorporating a single-stream architecture that integrates feature learning and template-search coupling within Vision Mamba. We introduce an adaptive curriculum learning (ACL) approach that dynamically adjusts sampling strategies and loss weights, thereby improving the model's ability of generalization. Our ACL is composed of two levels of curriculum schedulers: (1) sampling scheduler that transforms the data distribution from imbalanced to balanced, as well as from easier (daytime) to harder (nighttime) samples; (2) loss scheduler that dynamically assigns weights based on data frequency and the IOU. Exhaustive experiments on multiple nighttime UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaNUT achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring lower computational costs. The code will be available.		None
HUPE: Heuristic Underwater Perceptual Enhancement with Semantic Collaborative Learning	2024-11-29	Show Underwater images are often affected by light refraction and absorption, reducing visibility and interfering with subsequent applications. Existing underwater image enhancement methods primarily focus on improving visual quality while overlooking practical implications. To strike a balance between visual quality and application, we propose a heuristic invertible network for underwater perception enhancement, dubbed HUPE, which enhances visual quality and demonstrates flexibility in handling other downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduced an information-preserving reversible transformation with embedded Fourier transform to establish a bidirectional mapping between underwater images and their clear images. Additionally, a heuristic prior is incorporated into the enhancement process to better capture scene information. To further bridge the feature gap between vision-based enhancement images and application-oriented images, a semantic collaborative learning module is applied in the joint optimization process of the visual enhancement task and the downstream task, which guides the proposed enhancement model to extract more task-oriented semantic features while obtaining visually pleasing images. Extensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the superiority of our HUPE over state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZengxiZhang/HUPE.	22 pages, 21 figures	Code Link
Self-Supervised Denoiser Framework	2024-11-29	Show Reconstructing images using Computed Tomography (CT) in an industrial context leads to specific challenges that differ from those encountered in other areas, such as clinical CT. Indeed, non-destructive testing with industrial CT will often involve scanning multiple similar objects while maintaining high throughput, requiring short scanning times, which is not a relevant concern in clinical CT. Under-sampling the tomographic data (sinograms) is a natural way to reduce the scanning time at the cost of image quality since the latter depends on the number of measurements. In such a scenario, post-processing techniques are required to compensate for the image artifacts induced by the sinogram sparsity. We introduce the Self-supervised Denoiser Framework (SDF), a self-supervised training method that leverages pre-training on highly sampled sinogram data to enhance the quality of images reconstructed from undersampled sinogram data. The main contribution of SDF is that it proposes to train an image denoiser in the sinogram space by setting the learning task as the prediction of one sinogram subset from another. As such, it does not require ground-truth image data, leverages the abundant data modality in CT, the sinogram, and can drastically enhance the quality of images reconstructed from a fraction of the measurements. We demonstrate that SDF produces better image quality, in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio, than other analytical and self-supervised frameworks in both 2D fan-beam or 3D cone-beam CT settings. Moreover, we show that the enhancement provided by SDF carries over when fine-tuning the image denoiser on a few examples, making it a suitable pre-training technique in a context where there is little high-quality image data. Our results are established on experimental datasets, making SDF a strong candidate for being the building block of foundational image-enhancement models in CT.		None
Enhancing Consistency-Based Image Generation via Adversarialy-Trained Classification and Energy-Based Discrimination	2024-11-28	Show The recently introduced Consistency models pose an efficient alternative to diffusion algorithms, enabling rapid and good quality image synthesis. These methods overcome the slowness of diffusion models by directly mapping noise to data, while maintaining a (relatively) simpler training. Consistency models enable a fast one- or few-step generation, but they typically fall somewhat short in sample quality when compared to their diffusion origins. In this work we propose a novel and highly effective technique for post-processing Consistency-based generated images, enhancing their perceptual quality. Our approach utilizes a joint classifier-discriminator model, in which both portions are trained adversarially. While the classifier aims to grade an image based on its assignment to a designated class, the discriminator portion of the very same network leverages the softmax values to assess the proximity of the input image to the targeted data manifold, thereby serving as an Energy-based Model. By employing example-specific projected gradient iterations under the guidance of this joint machine, we refine synthesized images and achieve an improved FID scores on the ImageNet 64x64 dataset for both Consistency-Training and Consistency-Distillation techniques.		None
Joint RGB-Spectral Decomposition Model Guided Image Enhancement in Mobile Photography	2024-11-28	Show The integration of miniaturized spectrometers into mobile devices offers new avenues for image quality enhancement and facilitates novel downstream tasks. However, the broader application of spectral sensors in mobile photography is hindered by the inherent complexity of spectral images and the constraints of spectral imaging capabilities. To overcome these challenges, we propose a joint RGB-Spectral decomposition model guided enhancement framework, which consists of two steps: joint decomposition and prior-guided enhancement. Firstly, we leverage the complementarity between RGB and Low-resolution Multi-Spectral Images (Lr-MSI) to predict shading, reflectance, and material semantic priors. Subsequently, these priors are seamlessly integrated into the established HDRNet to promote dynamic range enhancement, color mapping, and grid expert learning, respectively. Additionally, we construct a high-quality Mobile-Spec dataset to support our research, and our experiments validate the effectiveness of Lr-MSI in the tone enhancement task. This work aims to establish a solid foundation for advancing spectral vision in mobile photography. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/CalayZhou/JDM-HDRNet}.		Code Link
Evaluating the Impact of Underwater Image Enhancement on Object Detection Performance: A Comprehensive Study	2024-11-26	Show Underwater imagery often suffers from severe degradation that results in low visual quality and object detection performance. This work aims to evaluate state-of-the-art image enhancement models, investigate their impact on underwater object detection, and explore their potential to improve detection performance. To this end, we selected representative underwater image enhancement models covering major enhancement categories and applied them separately to two recent datasets: 1) the Real-World Underwater Object Detection Dataset (RUOD), and 2) the Challenging Underwater Plant Detection Dataset (CUPDD). Following this, we conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses on the enhanced images and developed a quality index (Q-index) to compare the quality distribution of the original and enhanced images. Subsequently, we compared the performance of several YOLO-NAS detection models that are separately trained and tested on the original and enhanced image sets. Then, we performed a correlation study to examine the relationship between enhancement metrics and detection performance. We also analyzed the inference results from the trained detectors presenting cases where enhancement increased the detection performance as well as cases where enhancement revealed missed objects by human annotators. This study suggests that although enhancement generally deteriorates the detection performance, it can still be harnessed in some cases for increased detection performance and more accurate human annotation.		None
Semi-supervised Underwater Image Enhancement Using A Physics-Aware Triple-Stream Network	2024-11-25	Show Underwater images normally suffer from degradation due to the transmission medium of water bodies. Both traditional prior-based approaches and deep learning-based methods have been used to address this problem. However, the inflexible assumption of the former often impairs their effectiveness in handling diverse underwater scenes, while the generalization of the latter to unseen images is usually weakened by insufficient data. In this study, we leverage both the physics-based Image Formation Model (IFM) and deep learning techniques for Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE). To this end, we propose a novel Physics-Aware Triple-Stream Underwater Image Enhancement Network, i.e., PATS-UIENet, which comprises a Direct Signal Transmission Estimation Steam (D-Stream), a Backscatter Signal Transmission Estimation Steam (B-Stream) and an Ambient Light Estimation Stream (A-Stream). This network fulfills the UIE task by explicitly estimating the degradation parameters of a revised IFM. We also adopt an IFM-inspired semi-supervised learning framework, which exploits both the labeled and unlabeled images, to address the issue of insufficient data. To our knowledge, such a physics-aware deep network and the IFM-inspired semi-supervised learning framework have not been used for the UIE task before. Our method performs better than, or at least comparably to, sixteen baselines across six testing sets in the degradation estimation and UIE tasks. These promising results should be due to the fact that the proposed method can not only model the degradation but also learn the characteristics of diverse underwater scenes.	13 pages, 10 figures	None
CE-VAE: Capsule Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Underwater Image Enhancement	2024-11-22	Show Unmanned underwater image analysis for marine monitoring faces two key challenges: (i) degraded image quality due to light attenuation and (ii) hardware storage constraints limiting high-resolution image collection. Existing methods primarily address image enhancement with approaches that hinge on storing the full-size input. In contrast, we introduce the Capsule Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder (CE-VAE), a novel architecture designed to efficiently compress and enhance degraded underwater images. Our attention-aware image encoder can project the input image onto a latent space representation while being able to run online on a remote device. The only information that needs to be stored on the device or sent to a beacon is a compressed representation. There is a dual-decoder module that performs offline, full-size enhanced image generation. One branch reconstructs spatial details from the compressed latent space, while the second branch utilizes a capsule-clustering layer to capture entity-level structures and complex spatial relationships. This parallel decoding strategy enables the model to balance fine-detail preservation with context-aware enhancements. CE-VAE achieves state-of-the-art performance in underwater image enhancement on six benchmark datasets, providing up to 3x higher compression efficiency than existing approaches. Code available at \url{https://github.com/iN1k1/ce-vae-underwater-image-enhancement}.	Accep... Accepted for publication at IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)	Code Link
Zero-Shot Low-Light Image Enhancement via Joint Frequency Domain Priors Guided Diffusion	2024-11-21	Show Due to the singularity of real-world paired datasets and the complexity of low-light environments, this leads to supervised methods lacking a degree of scene generalisation. Meanwhile, limited by poor lighting and content guidance, existing zero-shot methods cannot handle unknown severe degradation well. To address this problem, we will propose a new zero-shot low-light enhancement method to compensate for the lack of light and structural information in the diffusion sampling process by effectively combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains to construct rich a priori information. The key to the inspiration comes from the similarity between the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains: both light and structure information are closely related to specific frequency domain regions, respectively. Therefore, by transferring the diffusion process to the wavelet low-frequency domain and combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains by continuously decomposing them in the inverse process, the constructed rich illumination prior is utilised to guide the image generation enhancement process. Sufficient experiments show that the framework is robust and effective in various scenarios. The code will be available at: \href{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}.		Code Link
Efficient Diffusion as Low Light Enhancer	2024-11-21	Show The computational burden of the iterative sampling process remains a major challenge in diffusion-based Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE). Current acceleration methods, whether training-based or training-free, often lead to significant performance degradation, highlighting the trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we identify two primary factors contributing to performance degradation: fitting errors and the inference gap. Our key insight is that fitting errors can be mitigated by linearly extrapolating the incorrect score functions, while the inference gap can be reduced by shifting the Gaussian flow to a reflectance-aware residual space. Based on the above insights, we design Reflectance-Aware Trajectory Refinement (RATR) module, a simple yet effective module to refine the teacher trajectory using the reflectance component of images. Following this, we introduce \textbf{Re}flectance-aware \textbf{D}iffusion with \textbf{Di}stilled \textbf{T}rajectory (\textbf{ReDDiT}), an efficient and flexible distillation framework tailored for LLIE. Our framework achieves comparable performance to previous diffusion-based methods with redundant steps in just 2 steps while establishing new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with 8 or 4 steps. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on 10 benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, consistently outperforming existing SOTA methods.	8 pages	None
Contourlet Refinement Gate Framework for Thermal Spectrum Distribution Regularized Infrared Image Super-Resolution	2024-11-19	Show Image super-resolution (SR) is a classical yet still active low-level vision problem that aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, serving as a key technique for image enhancement. Current approaches to address SR tasks, such as transformer-based and diffusion-based methods, are either dedicated to extracting RGB image features or assuming similar degradation patterns, neglecting the inherent modal disparities between infrared and visible images. When directly applied to infrared image SR tasks, these methods inevitably distort the infrared spectral distribution, compromising the machine perception in downstream tasks. In this work, we emphasize the infrared spectral distribution fidelity and propose a Contourlet refinement gate framework to restore infrared modal-specific features while preserving spectral distribution fidelity. Our approach captures high-pass subbands from multi-scale and multi-directional infrared spectral decomposition to recover infrared-degraded information through a gate architecture. The proposed Spectral Fidelity Loss regularizes the spectral frequency distribution during reconstruction, which ensures the preservation of both high- and low-frequency components and maintains the fidelity of infrared-specific features. We propose a two-stage prompt-learning optimization to guide the model in learning infrared HR characteristics from LR degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing image SR models in both visual and perceptual tasks while notably enhancing machine perception in downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hey-it-s-me/CoRPLE.	13 figures, 6 tables	Code Link
Oscillation Inversion: Understand the structure of Large Flow Model through the Lens of Inversion Method	2024-11-17	Show We explore the oscillatory behavior observed in inversion methods applied to large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, with a focus on the "Flux" model. By employing a fixed-point-inspired iterative approach to invert real-world images, we observe that the solution does not achieve convergence, instead oscillating between distinct clusters. Through both toy experiments and real-world diffusion models, we demonstrate that these oscillating clusters exhibit notable semantic coherence. We offer theoretical insights, showing that this behavior arises from oscillatory dynamics in rectified flow models. Building on this understanding, we introduce a simple and fast distribution transfer technique that facilitates image enhancement, stroke-based recoloring, as well as visual prompt-guided image editing. Furthermore, we provide quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of our method for tasks such as image enhancement, makeup transfer, reconstruction quality, and guided sampling quality. Higher-quality examples of videos and images are available at \href{https://yanyanzheng96.github.io/oscillation_inversion/}{this link}.		Code Link
Underwater Image Enhancement with Cascaded Contrastive Learning	2024-11-16	Show Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a highly challenging task due to the complexity of underwater environment and the diversity of underwater image degradation. Due to the application of deep learning, current UIE methods have made significant progress. Most of the existing deep learning-based UIE methods follow a single-stage network which cannot effectively address the diverse degradations simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by designing a two-stage deep learning framework and taking advantage of cascaded contrastive learning to guide the network training of each stage. The proposed method is called CCL-Net in short. Specifically, the proposed CCL-Net involves two cascaded stages, i.e., a color correction stage tailored to the color deviation issue and a haze removal stage tailored to improve the visibility and contrast of underwater images. To guarantee the underwater image can be progressively enhanced, we also apply contrastive loss as an additional constraint to guide the training of each stage. In the first stage, the raw underwater images are used as negative samples for building the first contrastive loss, ensuring the enhanced results of the first color correction stage are better than the original inputs. While in the second stage, the enhanced results rather than the raw underwater images of the first color correction stage are used as the negative samples for building the second contrastive loss, thus ensuring the final enhanced results of the second haze removal stage are better than the intermediate color corrected results. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CCL-Net can achieve superior performance compared to many state-of-the-art methods. The source code of CCL-Net will be released at https://github.com/lewis081/CCL-Net.	Accep... Accepted by IEEE Transacitons on MultiMedia	Code Link
Dropout the High-rate Downsampling: A Novel Design Paradigm for UHD Image Restoration	2024-11-10	Show With the popularization of high-end mobile devices, Ultra-high-definition (UHD) images have become ubiquitous in our lives. The restoration of UHD images is a highly challenging problem due to the exaggerated pixel count, which often leads to memory overflow during processing. Existing methods either downsample UHD images at a high rate before processing or split them into multiple patches for separate processing. However, high-rate downsampling leads to significant information loss, while patch-based approaches inevitably introduce boundary artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel design paradigm to solve the UHD image restoration problem, called D2Net. D2Net enables direct full-resolution inference on UHD images without the need for high-rate downsampling or dividing the images into several patches. Specifically, we ingeniously utilize the characteristics of the frequency domain to establish long-range dependencies of features. Taking into account the richer local patterns in UHD images, we also design a multi-scale convolutional group to capture local features. Additionally, during the decoding stage, we dynamically incorporate features from the encoding stage to reduce the flow of irrelevant information. Extensive experiments on three UHD image restoration tasks, including low-light image enhancement, image dehazing, and image deblurring, show that our model achieves better quantitative and qualitative results than state-of-the-art methods.	WACV2025	None
Real-world Instance-specific Image Goal Navigation: Bridging Domain Gaps via Contrastive Learning	2024-11-03	Show Improving instance-specific image goal navigation (InstanceImageNav), which locates the identical object in a real-world environment from a query image, is essential for robotic systems to assist users in finding desired objects. The challenge lies in the domain gap between low-quality images observed by the moving robot, characterized by motion blur and low-resolution, and high-quality query images provided by the user. Such domain gaps could significantly reduce the task success rate but have not been the focus of previous work. To address this, we propose a novel method called Few-shot Cross-quality Instance-aware Adaptation (CrossIA), which employs contrastive learning with an instance classifier to align features between massive low- and few high-quality images. This approach effectively reduces the domain gap by bringing the latent representations of cross-quality images closer on an instance basis. Additionally, the system integrates an object image collection with a pre-trained deblurring model to enhance the observed image quality. Our method fine-tunes the SimSiam model, pre-trained on ImageNet, using CrossIA. We evaluated our method's effectiveness through an InstanceImageNav task with 20 different types of instances, where the robot identifies the same instance in a real-world environment as a high-quality query image. Our experiments showed that our method improves the task success rate by up to three times compared to the baseline, a conventional approach based on SuperGlue. These findings highlight the potential of leveraging contrastive learning and image enhancement techniques to bridge the domain gap and improve object localization in robotic applications. The project website is https://emergentsystemlabstudent.github.io/DomainBridgingNav/.	See w... See website at https://emergentsystemlabstudent.github.io/DomainBridgingNav/. Accepted to IEEE IRC2024	Code Link
TPOT: Topology Preserving Optimal Transport in Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement	2024-11-03	Show Retinal fundus photography enhancement is important for diagnosing and monitoring retinal diseases. However, early approaches to retinal image enhancement, such as those based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), often struggle to preserve the complex topological information of blood vessels, resulting in spurious or missing vessel structures. The persistence diagram, which captures topological features based on the persistence of topological structures under different filtrations, provides a promising way to represent the structure information. In this work, we propose a topology-preserving training paradigm that regularizes blood vessel structures by minimizing the differences of persistence diagrams. We call the resulting framework Topology Preserving Optimal Transport (TPOT). Experimental results on a large-scale dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised techniques, both in terms of image quality and performance in the downstream blood vessel segmentation task. The code is available at https://github.com/Retinal-Research/TPOT.		Code Link
Medical X-Ray Image Enhancement Using Global Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization	2024-11-02	Show In medical imaging, accurate diagnosis heavily relies on effective image enhancement techniques, particularly for X-ray images. Existing methods often suffer from various challenges such as sacrificing global image characteristics over local image characteristics or vice versa. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called G-CLAHE (Global-Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization), which perfectly suits medical imaging with a focus on X-rays. This method adapts from Global Histogram Equalization (GHE) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) to take both advantages and avoid weakness to preserve local and global characteristics. Experimental results show that it can significantly improve current state-of-the-art algorithms to effectively address their limitations and enhance the contrast and quality of X-ray images for diagnostic accuracy.		None
Image Synthesis with Class-Aware Semantic Diffusion Models for Surgical Scene Segmentation	2024-10-31	Show Surgical scene segmentation is essential for enhancing surgical precision, yet it is frequently compromised by the scarcity and imbalance of available data. To address these challenges, semantic image synthesis methods based on generative adversarial networks and diffusion models have been developed. However, these models often yield non-diverse images and fail to capture small, critical tissue classes, limiting their effectiveness. In response, we propose the Class-Aware Semantic Diffusion Model (CASDM), a novel approach which utilizes segmentation maps as conditions for image synthesis to tackle data scarcity and imbalance. Novel class-aware mean squared error and class-aware self-perceptual loss functions have been defined to prioritize critical, less visible classes, thereby enhancing image quality and relevance. Furthermore, to our knowledge, we are the first to generate multi-class segmentation maps using text prompts in a novel fashion to specify their contents. These maps are then used by CASDM to generate surgical scene images, enhancing datasets for training and validating segmentation models. Our evaluation, which assesses both image quality and downstream segmentation performance, demonstrates the strong effectiveness and generalisability of CASDM in producing realistic image-map pairs, significantly advancing surgical scene segmentation across diverse and challenging datasets.		None
Analyzing Noise Models and Advanced Filtering Algorithms for Image Enhancement	2024-10-30	Show Noise, an unwanted component in an image, can be the reason for the degradation of Image at the time of transmission or capturing. Noise reduction from images is still a challenging task. Digital Image Processing is a component of Digital signal processing. A wide variety of algorithms can be used in image processing to apply to an image or an input dataset and obtain important outcomes. In image processing research, removing noise from images before further analysis is essential. Post-noise removal of images improves clarity, enabling better interpretation and analysis across medical imaging, satellite imagery, and radar applications. While numerous algorithms exist, each comes with its own assumptions, strengths, and limitations. The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of different filtering techniques on images with eight types of noise. It evaluates methodologies like Wiener, Median, Gaussian, Mean, Low pass, High pass, Laplacian and bilateral filtering, using the performance metric Peak signal to noise ratio. It shows us the impact of different filters on noise models by applying a variety of filters to various kinds of noise. Additionally, it also assists us in determining which filtering strategy is most appropriate for a certain noise model based on the circumstances.		None
Wavelet-based Mamba with Fourier Adjustment for Low-light Image Enhancement	2024-10-27	Show Frequency information (e.g., Discrete Wavelet Transform and Fast Fourier Transform) has been widely applied to solve the issue of Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE). However, existing frequency-based models primarily operate in the simple wavelet or Fourier space of images, which lacks utilization of valid global and local information in each space. We found that wavelet frequency information is more sensitive to global brightness due to its low-frequency component while Fourier frequency information is more sensitive to local details due to its phase component. In order to achieve superior preliminary brightness enhancement by optimally integrating spatial channel information with low-frequency components in the wavelet transform, we introduce channel-wise Mamba, which compensates for the long-range dependencies of CNNs and has lower complexity compared to Diffusion and Transformer models. So in this work, we propose a novel Wavelet-based Mamba with Fourier Adjustment model called WalMaFa, consisting of a Wavelet-based Mamba Block (WMB) and a Fast Fourier Adjustment Block (FFAB). We employ an Encoder-Latent-Decoder structure to accomplish the end-to-end transformation. Specifically, WMB is adopted in the Encoder and Decoder to enhance global brightness while FFAB is adopted in the Latent to fine-tune local texture details and alleviate ambiguity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed WalMaFa achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer computational resources and faster speed. Code is now available at: https://github.com/mcpaulgeorge/WalMaFa.	18 pa... 18 pages, 8 figures, ACCV2024	Code Link
Deep Learning, Machine Learning -- Digital Signal and Image Processing: From Theory to Application	2024-10-27	Show Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Digital Image Processing (DIP) with Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) are popular research areas in Computer Vision and related fields. We highlight transformative applications in image enhancement, filtering techniques, and pattern recognition. By integrating frameworks like the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), Z-Transform, and Fourier Transform methods, we enable robust data manipulation and feature extraction essential for AI-driven tasks. Using Python, we implement algorithms that optimize real-time data processing, forming a foundation for scalable, high-performance solutions in computer vision. This work illustrates the potential of ML and DL to advance DSP and DIP methodologies, contributing to artificial intelligence, automated feature extraction, and applications across diverse domains.	293 pages	None
HUE Dataset: High-Resolution Event and Frame Sequences for Low-Light Vision	2024-10-24	Show Low-light environments pose significant challenges for image enhancement methods. To address these challenges, in this work, we introduce the HUE dataset, a comprehensive collection of high-resolution event and frame sequences captured in diverse and challenging low-light conditions. Our dataset includes 106 sequences, encompassing indoor, cityscape, twilight, night, driving, and controlled scenarios, each carefully recorded to address various illumination levels and dynamic ranges. Utilizing a hybrid RGB and event camera setup. we collect a dataset that combines high-resolution event data with complementary frame data. We employ both qualitative and quantitative evaluations using no-reference metrics to assess state-of-the-art low-light enhancement and event-based image reconstruction methods. Additionally, we evaluate these methods on a downstream object detection task. Our findings reveal that while event-based methods perform well in specific metrics, they may produce false positives in practical applications. This dataset and our comprehensive analysis provide valuable insights for future research in low-light vision and hybrid camera systems.	18 pa... 18 pages, 4 figures. Has been accepted for publication at the European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ECCVW), Milano, 2024. The project page can be found at https://ercanburak.github.io/HUE.html	Code Link
Capsule Endoscopy Image Enhancement for Small Intestinal Villi Clarity	2024-10-24	Show This paper presents, for the first time, an image enhancement methodology designed to enhance the clarity of small intestinal villi in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) images. This method first separates the low-frequency and high-frequency components of small intestinal villi images using guided filtering. Subsequently, an adaptive light gain factor is generated based on the low-frequency component, and an adaptive gradient gain factor is derived from the convolution results of the Laplacian operator in different regions of small intestinal villi images. The obtained light gain factor and gradient gain factor are then combined to enhance the high-frequency components. Finally, the enhanced high-frequency component is fused with the original image to achieve adaptive sharpening of the edges of WCE small intestinal villi images. The experiments affirm that, compared to established WCE image enhancement methods, our approach not only accentuates the edge details of WCE small intestine villi images but also skillfully suppresses noise amplification, thereby preventing the occurrence of edge overshooting.		None
Dynamic Test-Time Augmentation via Differentiable Functions	2024-10-22	Show Distribution shifts, which often occur in the real world, degrade the accuracy of deep learning systems, and thus improving robustness to distribution shifts is essential for practical applications. To improve robustness, we study an image enhancement method that generates recognition-friendly images without retraining the recognition model. We propose a novel image enhancement method, DynTTA, which is based on differentiable data augmentation techniques and generates a blended image from many augmented images to improve the recognition accuracy under distribution shifts. In addition to standard data augmentations, DynTTA also incorporates deep neural network-based image transformation, further improving the robustness. Because DynTTA is composed of differentiable functions, it can be directly trained with the classification loss of the recognition model. In experiments with widely used image recognition datasets using various classification models, DynTTA improves the robustness with almost no reduction in classification accuracy for clean images, thus outperforming the existing methods. Furthermore, the results show that robustness is significantly improved by estimating the training-time augmentations for distribution-shifted datasets using DynTTA and retraining the recognition model with the estimated augmentations. DynTTA is a promising approach for applications that require both clean accuracy and robustness. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/s-enmt/DynTTA}.	IEEE Access	Code Link
SLLEN: Semantic-aware Low-light Image Enhancement Network	2024-10-21	Show How to effectively explore semantic feature is vital for low-light image enhancement (LLE). Existing methods usually utilize the semantic feature that is only drawn from the output produced by high-level semantic segmentation (SS) network. However, if the output is not accurately estimated, it would affect the high-level semantic feature (HSF) extraction, which accordingly interferes with LLE. To this end, we develop a simple and effective semantic-aware LLE network (SSLEN) composed of a LLE main-network (LLEmN) and a SS auxiliary-network (SSaN). In SLLEN, LLEmN integrates the random intermediate embedding feature (IEF), i.e., the information extracted from the intermediate layer of SSaN, together with the HSF into a unified framework for better LLE. SSaN is designed to act as a SS role to provide HSF and IEF. Moreover, thanks to a shared encoder between LLEmN and SSaN, we further propose an alternating training mechanism to facilitate the collaboration between them. Unlike currently available approaches, the proposed SLLEN is able to fully lever the semantic information, e.g., IEF, HSF, and SS dataset, to assist LLE, thereby leading to a more promising enhancement performance. Comparisons between the proposed SLLEN and other state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate the superiority of SLLEN with respect to LLE quality over all the comparable alternatives.		None
An Improved Chicken Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Handwritten Document Image Enhancement	2024-10-20	Show Chicken swarm optimization is a new meta-heuristic algorithm which mimics the foraging hierarchical behavior of chicken. In this paper, we describe the preprocessing of handwritten document by contrast enhancement while preserving detail with an improved chicken swarm optimization algorithm.The results of the algorithm are compared with other existing meta heuristic algorithms like Cuckoo Search, Firefly Algorithm and the Artificial bee colony. The proposed algorithm considerably outperforms all the above by giving good results.	6 pag... 6 pages, 2 figures, conference	None
LIME-Eval: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement Evaluation via Object Detection	2024-10-14	Show Due to the nature of enhancement--the absence of paired ground-truth information, high-level vision tasks have been recently employed to evaluate the performance of low-light image enhancement. A widely-used manner is to see how accurately an object detector trained on enhanced low-light images by different candidates can perform with respect to annotated semantic labels. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the mentioned approach is generally prone to overfitting, and thus diminishes its measurement reliability. In search of a proper evaluation metric, we propose LIME-Bench, the first online benchmark platform designed to collect human preferences for low-light enhancement, providing a valuable dataset for validating the correlation between human perception and automated evaluation metrics. We then customize LIME-Eval, a novel evaluation framework that utilizes detectors pre-trained on standard-lighting datasets without object annotations, to judge the quality of enhanced images. By adopting an energy-based strategy to assess the accuracy of output confidence maps, our LIME-Eval can simultaneously bypass biases associated with retraining detectors and circumvent the reliance on annotations for dim images. Comprehensive experiments are provided to reveal the effectiveness of our LIME-Eval. Our benchmark platform (https://huggingface.co/spaces/lime-j/eval) and code (https://github.com/lime-j/lime-eval) are available online.		Code Link
LoLI-Street: Benchmarking Low-Light Image Enhancement and Beyond	2024-10-13	Show Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is essential for numerous computer vision tasks, including object detection, tracking, segmentation, and scene understanding. Despite substantial research on improving low-quality images captured in underexposed conditions, clear vision remains critical for autonomous vehicles, which often struggle with low-light scenarios, signifying the need for continuous research. However, paired datasets for LLIE are scarce, particularly for street scenes, limiting the development of robust LLIE methods. Despite using advanced transformers and/or diffusion-based models, current LLIE methods struggle in real-world low-light conditions and lack training on street-scene datasets, limiting their effectiveness for autonomous vehicles. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a new dataset LoLI-Street (Low-Light Images of Streets) with 33k paired low-light and well-exposed images from street scenes in developed cities, covering 19k object classes for object detection. LoLI-Street dataset also features 1,000 real low-light test images for testing LLIE models under real-life conditions. Furthermore, we propose a transformer and diffusion-based LLIE model named "TriFuse". Leveraging the LoLI-Street dataset, we train and evaluate our TriFuse and SOTA models to benchmark on our dataset. Comparing various models, our dataset's generalization feasibility is evident in testing across different mainstream datasets by significantly enhancing images and object detection for practical applications in autonomous driving and surveillance systems. The complete code and dataset is available on https://github.com/tanvirnwu/TriFuse.	Accep... Accepted by the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2024)	Code Link
FogGuard: guarding YOLO against fog using perceptual loss	2024-10-11	Show In this paper, we present FogGuard, a novel fog-aware object detection network designed to address the challenges posed by foggy weather conditions. Autonomous driving systems heavily rely on accurate object detection algorithms, but adverse weather conditions can significantly impact the reliability of deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing approaches include image enhancement techniques like IA-YOLO and domain adaptation methods. While image enhancement aims to generate clear images from foggy ones, which is more challenging than object detection in foggy images, domain adaptation does not require labeled data in the target domain. Our approach involves fine-tuning on a specific dataset to address these challenges efficiently. FogGuard compensates for foggy conditions in the scene, ensuring robust performance by incorporating YOLOv3 as the baseline algorithm and introducing a unique Teacher-Student Perceptual loss for accurate object detection in foggy environments. Through comprehensive evaluations on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC and RTTS, our network significantly improves performance, achieving a 69.43% mAP compared to YOLOv3's 57.78% on the RTTS dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate that while our training method slightly increases time complexity, it doesn't add overhead during inference compared to the regular YOLO network.	8 pag... 8 pages, 1 figures, submitted on Robotic and Automation Letters	None
CDAN: Convolutional dense attention-guided network for low-light image enhancement	2024-10-11	Show Low-light images, characterized by inadequate illumination, pose challenges of diminished clarity, muted colors, and reduced details. Low-light image enhancement, an essential task in computer vision, aims to rectify these issues by improving brightness, contrast, and overall perceptual quality, thereby facilitating accurate analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces the Convolutional Dense Attention-guided Network (CDAN), a novel solution for enhancing low-light images. CDAN integrates an autoencoder-based architecture with convolutional and dense blocks, complemented by an attention mechanism and skip connections. This architecture ensures efficient information propagation and feature learning. Furthermore, a dedicated post-processing phase refines color balance and contrast. Our approach demonstrates notable progress compared to state-of-the-art results in low-light image enhancement, showcasing its robustness across a wide range of challenging scenarios. Our model performs remarkably on benchmark datasets, effectively mitigating under-exposure and proficiently restoring textures and colors in diverse low-light scenarios. This achievement underscores CDAN's potential for diverse computer vision tasks, notably enabling robust object detection and recognition in challenging low-light conditions.	Publi... Published in the Digital Signal Processing journal, 15 Pages, 13 Figures	None
Exploring Distortion Prior with Latent Diffusion Models for Remote Sensing Image Compression	2024-10-07	Show Deep learning-based image compression algorithms typically focus on designing encoding and decoding networks and improving the accuracy of entropy model estimation to enhance the rate-distortion (RD) performance. However, few algorithms leverage the compression distortion prior from existing compression algorithms to improve RD performance. In this paper, we propose a latent diffusion model-based remote sensing image compression (LDM-RSIC) method, which aims to enhance the final decoding quality of RS images by utilizing the generated distortion prior from a LDM. Our approach consists of two stages. In the first stage, a self-encoder learns prior from the high-quality input image. In the second stage, the prior is generated through an LDM, conditioned on the decoded image of an existing learning-based image compression algorithm, to be used as auxiliary information for generating the texture-rich enhanced image. To better utilize the prior, a channel attention and gate-based dynamic feature attention module (DFAM) is embedded into a Transformer-based multi-scale enhancement network (MEN) for image enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed LDM-RSIC significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art traditional and learning-based image compression algorithms in terms of both subjective perception and objective metrics. Additionally, we use the LDM-based scheme to improve the traditional image compression algorithm JPEG2000 and obtain 32.00% bit savings on the DOTA testing set. The code will be available at https://github.com/mlkk518/LDM-RSIC.		Code Link
Generalizability analysis of deep learning predictions of human brain responses to augmented and semantically novel visual stimuli	2024-10-06	Show The purpose of this work is to investigate the soundness and utility of a neural network-based approach as a framework for exploring the impact of image enhancement techniques on visual cortex activation. In a preliminary study, we prepare a set of state-of-the-art brain encoding models, selected among the top 10 methods that participated in The Algonauts Project 2023 Challenge [16]. We analyze their ability to make valid predictions about the effects of various image enhancement techniques on neural responses. Given the impossibility of acquiring the actual data due to the high costs associated with brain imaging procedures, our investigation builds up on a series of experiments. Specifically, we analyze the ability of brain encoders to estimate the cerebral reaction to various augmentations by evaluating the response to augmentations targeting objects (i.e., faces and words) with known impact on specific areas. Moreover, we study the predicted activation in response to objects unseen during training, exploring the impact of semantically out-of-distribution stimuli. We provide relevant evidence for the generalization ability of the models forming the proposed framework, which appears to be promising for the identification of the optimal visual augmentation filter for a given task, model-driven design strategies as well as for AR and VR applications.		None
ATTIQA: Generalizable Image Quality Feature Extractor using Attribute-aware Pretraining	2024-10-05	Show In no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), the challenge of limited dataset sizes hampers the development of robust and generalizable models. Conventional methods address this issue by utilizing large datasets to extract rich representations for IQA. Also, some approaches propose vision language models (VLM) based IQA, but the domain gap between generic VLM and IQA constrains their scalability. In this work, we propose a novel pretraining framework that constructs a generalizable representation for IQA by selectively extracting quality-related knowledge from VLM and leveraging the scalability of large datasets. Specifically, we select optimal text prompts for five representative image quality attributes and use VLM to generate pseudo-labels. Numerous attribute-aware pseudo-labels can be generated with large image datasets, allowing our IQA model to learn rich representations about image quality. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple IQA datasets and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities. Leveraging these strengths, we propose several applications, such as evaluating image generation models and training image enhancement models, demonstrating our model's real-world applicability.		None
Can Capacitive Touch Images Enhance Mobile Keyboard Decoding?	2024-10-03	Show Capacitive touch sensors capture the two-dimensional spatial profile (referred to as a touch heatmap) of a finger's contact with a mobile touchscreen. However, the research and design of touchscreen mobile keyboards -- one of the most speed and accuracy demanding touch interfaces -- has focused on the location of the touch centroid derived from the touch image heatmap as the input, discarding the rest of the raw spatial signals. In this paper, we investigate whether touch heatmaps can be leveraged to further improve the tap decoding accuracy for mobile touchscreen keyboards. Specifically, we developed and evaluated machine-learning models that interpret user taps by using the centroids and/or the heatmaps as their input and studied the contribution of the heatmaps to model performance. The results show that adding the heatmap into the input feature set led to 21.4% relative reduction of character error rates on average, compared to using the centroid alone. Furthermore, we conducted a live user study with the centroid-based and heatmap-based decoders built into Pixel 6 Pro devices and observed lower error rate, faster typing speed, and higher self-reported satisfaction score based on the heatmap-based decoder than the centroid-based decoder. These findings underline the promise of utilizing touch heatmaps for improving typing experience in mobile keyboards.	Accep... Accepted to UIST 2024	None
GMT: Enhancing Generalizable Neural Rendering via Geometry-Driven Multi-Reference Texture Transfer	2024-10-01	Show Novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to generate images at arbitrary viewpoints using multi-view images, and recent insights from neural radiance fields (NeRF) have contributed to remarkable improvements. Recently, studies on generalizable NeRF (G-NeRF) have addressed the challenge of per-scene optimization in NeRFs. The construction of radiance fields on-the-fly in G-NeRF simplifies the NVS process, making it well-suited for real-world applications. Meanwhile, G-NeRF still struggles in representing fine details for a specific scene due to the absence of per-scene optimization, even with texture-rich multi-view source inputs. As a remedy, we propose a Geometry-driven Multi-reference Texture transfer network (GMT) available as a plug-and-play module designed for G-NeRF. Specifically, we propose ray-imposed deformable convolution (RayDCN), which aligns input and reference features reflecting scene geometry. Additionally, the proposed texture preserving transformer (TP-Former) aggregates multi-view source features while preserving texture information. Consequently, our module enables direct interaction between adjacent pixels during the image enhancement process, which is deficient in G-NeRF models with an independent rendering process per pixel. This addresses constraints that hinder the ability to capture high-frequency details. Experiments show that our plug-and-play module consistently improves G-NeRF models on various benchmark datasets.	Accep... Accepted at ECCV 2024. Code available at https://github.com/yh-yoon/GMT	Code Link
Underwater Organism Color Enhancement via Color Code Decomposition, Adaptation and Interpolation	2024-09-29	Show Underwater images often suffer from quality degradation due to absorption and scattering effects. Most existing underwater image enhancement algorithms produce a single, fixed-color image, limiting user flexibility and application. To address this limitation, we propose a method called \textit{ColorCode}, which enhances underwater images while offering a range of controllable color outputs. Our approach involves recovering an underwater image to a reference enhanced image through supervised training and decomposing it into color and content codes via self-reconstruction and cross-reconstruction. The color code is explicitly constrained to follow a Gaussian distribution, allowing for efficient sampling and interpolation during inference. ColorCode offers three key features: 1) color enhancement, producing an enhanced image with a fixed color; 2) color adaptation, enabling controllable adjustments of long-wavelength color components using guidance images; and 3) color interpolation, allowing for the smooth generation of multiple colors through continuous sampling of the color code. Quantitative and visual evaluations on popular and challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of ColorCode over existing methods in providing diverse, controllable, and color-realistic enhancement results. The source code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/ColorCode.		Code Link
MixNet: Efficient Global Modeling for Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration	2024-09-29	Show Recent advancements in image restoration methods employing global modeling have shown promising results. However, these approaches often incur substantial memory requirements, particularly when processing ultra-high-definition (UHD) images. In this paper, we propose a novel image restoration method called MixNet, which introduces an alternative approach to global modeling approaches and is more effective for UHD image restoration. To capture the longrange dependency of features without introducing excessive computational complexity, we present the Global Feature Modulation Layer (GFML). GFML associates features from different views by permuting the feature maps, enabling efficient modeling of long-range dependency. In addition, we also design the Local Feature Modulation Layer (LFML) and Feed-forward Layer (FFL) to capture local features and transform features into a compact representation. This way, our MixNetachieves effective restoration with low inference time overhead and computational complexity. We conduct extensive experiments on four UHD image restoration tasks, including low-light image enhancement, underwater image enhancement, image deblurring and image demoireing, and the comprehensive results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses the performance of current state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/5chen/MixNet}.	under review	Code Link
Three-stage binarization of color document images based on discrete wavelet transform and generative adversarial networks	2024-09-28	Show The efficient extraction of text information from the background in degraded color document images is an important challenge in the preservation of ancient manuscripts. The imperfect preservation of ancient manuscripts has led to different types of degradation over time, such as page yellowing, staining, and ink bleeding, seriously affecting the results of document image binarization. This work proposes an effective three-stage network method to image enhancement and binarization of degraded documents using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Specifically, in Stage-1, we first split the input images into multiple patches, and then split these patches into four single-channel patch images (gray, red, green, and blue). Then, three single-channel patch images (red, green, and blue) are processed by the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with normalization. In Stage-2, we use four independent generators to separately train GAN models based on the four channels on the processed patch images to extract color foreground information. Finally, in Stage-3, we train two independent GAN models on the outputs of Stage-2 and the resized original input images (512x512) as the local and global predictions to obtain the final outputs. The experimental results show that the Avg-Score metrics of the proposed method are 77.64, 77.95, 79.05, 76.38, 75.34, and 77.00 on the (H)-DIBCO 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 datasets, which are at the state-of-the-art level. The implementation code for this work is available at https://github.com/abcpp12383/ThreeStageBinarization.	Accep... Accepted by Knowledge-Based Systems	Code Link
PDCFNet: Enhancing Underwater Images through Pixel Difference Convolution	2024-09-28	Show Majority of deep learning methods utilize vanilla convolution for enhancing underwater images. While vanilla convolution excels in capturing local features and learning the spatial hierarchical structure of images, it tends to smooth input images, which can somewhat limit feature expression and modeling. A prominent characteristic of underwater degraded images is blur, and the goal of enhancement is to make the textures and details (high-frequency features) in the images more visible. Therefore, we believe that leveraging high-frequency features can improve enhancement performance. To address this, we introduce Pixel Difference Convolution (PDC), which focuses on gradient information with significant changes in the image, thereby improving the modeling of enhanced images. We propose an underwater image enhancement network, PDCFNet, based on PDC and cross-level feature fusion. Specifically, we design a detail enhancement module based on PDC that employs parallel PDCs to capture high-frequency features, leading to better detail and texture enhancement. The designed cross-level feature fusion module performs operations such as concatenation and multiplication on features from different levels, ensuring sufficient interaction and enhancement between diverse features. Our proposed PDCFNet achieves a PSNR of 27.37 and an SSIM of 92.02 on the UIEB dataset, attaining the best performance to date. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangsong1213/PDCFNet.		Code Link
Unsupervised Low-light Image Enhancement with Lookup Tables and Diffusion Priors	2024-09-27	Show Low-light image enhancement (LIE) aims at precisely and efficiently recovering an image degraded in poor illumination environments. Recent advanced LIE techniques are using deep neural networks, which require lots of low-normal light image pairs, network parameters, and computational resources. As a result, their practicality is limited. In this work, we devise a novel unsupervised LIE framework based on diffusion priors and lookup tables (DPLUT) to achieve efficient low-light image recovery. The proposed approach comprises two critical components: a light adjustment lookup table (LLUT) and a noise suppression lookup table (NLUT). LLUT is optimized with a set of unsupervised losses. It aims at predicting pixel-wise curve parameters for the dynamic range adjustment of a specific image. NLUT is designed to remove the amplified noise after the light brightens. As diffusion models are sensitive to noise, diffusion priors are introduced to achieve high-performance noise suppression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and efficiency.	13 pages, 10 figures	None
Underwater Image Enhancement with Physical-based Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models	2024-09-27	Show Underwater vision is crucial for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and enhancing degraded underwater images in real-time on a resource-constrained AUV is a key challenge due to factors like light absorption and scattering, or the sufficient model computational complexity to resolve such factors. Traditional image enhancement techniques lack adaptability to varying underwater conditions, while learning-based methods, particularly those using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs), offer more robust solutions but face limitations such as inadequate enhancement, unstable training, or mode collapse. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have emerged as a state-of-the-art approach in image-to-image tasks but require intensive computational complexity to achieve the desired underwater image enhancement (UIE) using the recent UW-DDPM solution. To address these challenges, this paper introduces UW-DiffPhys, a novel physical-based and diffusion-based UIE approach. UW-DiffPhys combines light-computation physical-based UIE network components with a denoising U-Net to replace the computationally intensive distribution transformation U-Net in the existing UW-DDPM framework, reducing complexity while maintaining performance. Additionally, the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) is employed to accelerate the inference process through non-Markovian sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that UW-DiffPhys achieved a substantial reduction in computational complexity and inference time compared to UW-DDPM, with competitive performance in key metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, UCIQE, and an improvement in the overall underwater image quality UIQM metric. The implementation code can be found at the following repository: https://github.com/bachzz/UW-DiffPhys		Code Link