# Structural Prior Guided Generative Adversarial Transformers for Low-Light Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07828 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07828/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00734/) (2018)
- [LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03995/) (2015)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00860/) (2021)
- [Low Dose CT Image Denoising Using a Generative Adversarial Network with Wasserstein Distance and Perceptual Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00961/) (2017)
- [TransGAN: Two Pure Transformers Can Make One Strong GAN, and That Can Scale Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07074/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10729/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Pyramid Dehazing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08396/) (2018)
- [RankSRGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Ranker for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06382/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01209/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Networks in Computer Vision: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08641/) (2023)
- [Unveiling Advanced Frequency Disentanglement Paradigm for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01641/) (2024)
- [Mutual Guidance and Residual Integration for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13919/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose an effective Structural Prior guided Generative Adversarial Transformer (SPGAT) to solve low-light image enhancement. Our SPGAT mainly contains a generator with two discriminators and a structural prior estimator (SPE). The generator is based on a U-shaped Transformer which is used to explore non-local information for better clear image restoration. The SPE is used to explore useful structures from images to guide the generator for better structural detail estimation. To generate more realistic images, we develop a new structural prior guided adversarial learning method by building the skip connections between the generator and discriminators so that the discriminators can better discriminate between real and fake features. Finally, we propose a parallel windows-based Swin Transformer block to aggregate different level hierarchical features for high-quality image restoration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SPGAT performs favorably against recent state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.