# Enhancement by Your Aesthetic: An Intelligible Unsupervised Personalized Enhancer for Low-Light Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10220/) (2018)
- [R2RNet: Low-light Image Enhancement via Real-low to Real-normal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14501/) (2021)
- [StarEnhancer: Learning Real-Time and Style-Aware Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12898/) (2021)
- [Progressive Retinex: Mutually Reinforced Illumination-Noise Perception Network for Low Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11323/) (2019)
- [ReLLIE: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05830/) (2021)
- [Towards Bidirectional Arbitrary Image Rescaling: Joint Optimization and Cycle Idempotence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00911/) (2022)
- [Fast Enhancement for Non-Uniform Illumination Images using Light-weight CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00439/) (2020)
- [Enhance Images as You Like with Unpaired Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01161/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FourLLIE: Boosting Low-Light Image Enhancement by Fourier Frequency Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03033/) (2023)
- [Empowering Low-Light Image Enhancer through Customized Learnable Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01958/) (2023)
- [View-Centric Multi-Object Tracking with Homographic Matching in Moving UAV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10830/) (2024)
- [Brighten-and-Colorize: A Decoupled Network for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03029/) (2023)
- [WaterWave: Bridging Underwater Image Enhancement into Video Streams via Wavelet-based Temporal Consistency Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05492/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light image enhancement is an inherently subjective process whose targets vary with the user's aesthetic. Motivated by this, several personalized enhancement methods have been investigated. However, the enhancement process based on user preferences in these techniques is invisible, i.e., a "black box". In this work, we propose an intelligible unsupervised personalized enhancer (iUPEnhancer) for low-light images, which establishes the correlations between the low-light and the unpaired reference images with regard to three user-friendly attributions (brightness, chromaticity, and noise). The proposed iUP-Enhancer is trained with the guidance of these correlations and the corresponding unsupervised loss functions. Rather than a "black box" process, our iUP-Enhancer presents an intelligible enhancement process with the above attributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm produces competitive qualitative and quantitative results while maintaining excellent flexibility and scalability. This can be validated by personalization with single/multiple references, cross-attribution references, or merely adjusting parameters.