# DA-DRN: Degradation-Aware Deep Retinex Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Bio-Inspired Multi-Exposure Fusion Framework for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00591/) (2017)
- [Joint Enhancement and Denoising Method via Sequential Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08468/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Image Enhancement Network: Training with Low Light Images Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11300/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TSN-CA: A Two-Stage Network with Channel Attention for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02477/) (2021)
- [Deep Pneumonia: Attention-Based Contrastive Learning for Class-Imbalanced Pneumonia Lesion Recognition in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11393/) (2022)
- [CodeEnhance: A Codebook-Driven Approach for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05253/) (2024)
- [MambaLIE: Scene Light Intensity-Boosted Low-Light Image Enhancement with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Images obtained in real-world low-light conditions are not only low in brightness, but they also suffer from many other types of degradation, such as color distortion, unknown noise, detail loss and halo artifacts. In this paper, we propose a Degradation-Aware Deep Retinex Network (denoted as DA-DRN) for low-light image enhancement and tackle the above degradation. Based on Retinex Theory, the decomposition net in our model can decompose low-light images into reflectance and illumination maps and deal with the degradation in the reflectance during the decomposition phase directly. We propose a Degradation-Aware Module (DA Module) which can guide the training process of the decomposer and enable the decomposer to be a restorer during the training phase without additional computational cost in the test phase. DA Module can achieve the purpose of noise removal while preserving detail information into the illumination map as well as tackle color distortion and halo artifacts. We introduce Perceptual Loss to train the enhancement network to generate the brightness-improved illumination maps which are more consistent with human visual perception. We train and evaluate the performance of our proposed model over the LOL real-world and LOL synthetic datasets, and we also test our model over several other frequently used datasets without Ground-Truth (LIME, DICM, MEF and NPE datasets). We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our approach achieves a promising effect with good rubustness and generalization and outperforms many other state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Our method only takes 7 ms to process an image with 600x400 resolution on a TITAN Xp GPU.