# SurroundNet: Towards Effective Low-Light Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03995/) (2015)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05923/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10477/) (2018)
- [Attention Guided Low-light Image Enhancement with a Large Scale Low-light Simulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00682/) (2019)
- [MSR-net:Low-light Image Enhancement Using Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02488/) (2017)
- [Progressive Retinex: Mutually Reinforced Illumination-Noise Perception Network for Low Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11323/) (2019)
- [Semantic Understanding of Foggy Scenes with Purely Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03997/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [GM-MoE: Low-Light Enhancement with Gated-Mechanism Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07417/) (2025)
- [Guided Frequency Loss for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15563/) (2023)
- [Max360IQ: Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment with Multi-axis Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19046/) (2025)
- [SAIGFormer: A Spatially-Adaptive Illumination-Guided Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15520/) (2025)
- [ITRE: Low-light Image Enhancement Based on Illumination Transmission Ratio Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05158/) (2023)
- [Impact of Underwater Image Enhancement on Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21715/) (2025)
- [IAML: Illumination-Aware Mirror Loss for Progressive Learning in Low-Light Image Enhancement Auto-encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13363/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) has made substantial progress in the low-light image enhancement task, one critical problem of CNNs is the paradox of model complexity and performance. This paper presents a novel SurroundNet which only involves less than 150K parameters (about 80-98 percent size reduction compared to SOTAs) and achieves very competitive performance. The proposed network comprises several Adaptive Retinex Blocks (ARBlock), which can be viewed as a novel extension of Single Scale Retinex in feature space. The core of our ARBlock is an efficient illumination estimation function called Adaptive Surround Function (ASF). It can be regarded as a general form of surround functions and be implemented by convolution layers. In addition, we also introduce a Low-Exposure Denoiser (LED) to smooth the low-light image before the enhancement. We evaluate the proposed method on the real-world low-light dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the superiority of our submitted SurroundNet in both performance and network parameters against State-of-the-Art low-light image enhancement methods. Code is available at https: github.com/ouc-ocean-group/SurroundNet.