# Shed Various Lights on a Low-Light Image: Multi-Level Enhancement Guided by Arbitrary References

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00813 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00813/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03995/) (2015)
- [MSR-net:Low-light Image Enhancement Using Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02488/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is suggested that low-light image enhancement realizes one-to-many mapping since we have different definitions of NORMAL-light given application scenarios or users' aesthetic. However, most existing methods ignore subjectivity of the task, and simply produce one result with fixed brightness. This paper proposes a neural network for multi-level low-light image enhancement, which is user-friendly to meet various requirements by selecting different images as brightness reference. Inspired by style transfer, our method decomposes an image into two low-coupling feature components in the latent space, which allows the concatenation feasibility of the content components from low-light images and the luminance components from reference images. In such a way, the network learns to extract scene-invariant and brightness-specific information from a set of image pairs instead of learning brightness differences. Moreover, information except for the brightness is preserved to the greatest extent to alleviate color distortion. Extensive results show strong capacity and superiority of our network against existing methods.